Marked

two-3

He grabbed her arm. “You’re not going f*****g anywhere,” he snarled. “Do you know who the f**k I am? There isn’t a place in this country you could go that I couldn’t find you.”

Yanking her arm from his grip, Nya followed up with a push. “Then own me, Arch. You don’t get to make choices about my club, my apartment, my life, until you’re willing to be proud of me. Remember what I said to you about the man I would end up with? I told you my guy has to be willing to declare me as his openly. I wouldn’t deny our love for anything.”

“You also told me I should protect you from other guys. I was doing that tonight. Just like you when you kissed me at the bar because you didn’t like that those females were getting too close to me.”

Nya couldn’t deny what she’d felt at seeing the young party girls who would be a great distraction for him. Archer said he didn’t associate with w****s, but that didn’t mean he’d never had a one-night stand. If he was working off the same reserves as she was, it had been thirty-nine days since he’d had s*x. He probably needed a release.

“These are the fights we were supposed to stop having,” she said.

When they’d broken up, he’d shut her out. When that hadn’t worked and she kept pestering him, they began to talk again and Nya figured out pretty fast that he still cared about her. They had a few sentimental moments, a few intimate ones too when they may have kissed by mistake or she may have accidentally stripped n***d in front of him and let him take liberties in touching sensitive parts of her body.

They seemed to be moving past the denial part of the break-up. Tonight, she’d landed smack bang in the middle of anger.

He had to feel the same way and didn’t come up with any response. “I don’t know what we’re doing here anymore, Archer. I don’t know what it is that you want from me. You want to make the decisions, but you don’t want me to be your girl. You flirt with me, but I’m not supposed to make a move on you. You kiss me—”

“You kissed me tonight, Squirm. I’ve kept my lips from yours for ten days.”

Exhausted and confused, Nya was losing her perspective. “Maybe we need distance, because this is messing with my head.”

His anger grew. “What kind of distance?” he asked. “Are you telling me you’re going to his bed?”

Archer knew that she’d slept next to Tag a thousand times. The friends had never had s*x, there was nothing s****l about her relationship with Tag. But Archer despised the idea of her lying with him.

“Not tonight. I hate drugs. The coke made Damien worse,” she said. “When he came home twitchy like that, I knew I was gonna get it for something.”

He tried to touch her face, but she shrugged him off. “Babe—”

“Tag knows I hate it. I’ll call him later and make sure he got home. You can go home. You’ll hear me come in; you don’t have to wait. We’ll just give each other space. I was supposed to be going to dinner with Ester tomorrow, but I’ll cancel. I’ll give her an excuse. You don’t have to say anything for me.”

“This is dinner with her new guy?” he asked and she nodded. “I’m not going to that.”

As adamant as he was about keeping himself apart from Ester’s casual relationships, Nya was disappointed that he wasn’t willing to make an effort with Woodrow, who Ester claimed to love.

“She’ll be devastated,” Nya said. “This means a lot to her, Arch.”

There was just no wiggle room when he’d made up his mind. “Then you go. I don’t like spending time with her in my own apartment. I’m not going out to be part of some parade. It’s bullshit.”

Anger infused her again. “Well fine then, you sit in your little hole and you brood. Ester and I will have the time of our lives.”

“I have business out of town anyway. I was putting it off, but I’ll leave in the morning, get it out of the way.”

“Fine, you do that.”

He took a step back. “It means I won’t be around, Ny. You’ll have to look out for yourself.”

“I did fine for twenty-nine years before you showed up,” she said, although Archer could poke holes in that by pointing out she was only so close to Tag because he’d saved her a*s.

“I’ll be back the next day and you can call—”

“Oh, Arch, just f**k off.”

In recent weeks, every time she’d looked at him, her heart had ached because there had been this barrier between what they had and what she wanted. Maybe it was the frustration of that coming to a head that was getting her so worked up tonight.

Nya didn’t like this phase because it felt like a transition. While he might be able to slip her into a friendship zone and be happy to leave her there, Nya would never be able to move on from what they had, to settle for anything less. Every relationship after Archer would be less potent.

Yes, she’d been desperate to have contact with him because she wanted him in her life and she’d even once told Tag that she wanted to be Archer’s friend. But she couldn’t go on like this forever. Tag was right that she’d never been friends with exes. Most of the time it was because she wanted to get as far away from the animosity of the breakup as she could.

She and Archer didn’t have that hostility at the end of their relationship and she thought that meant they could work through their issues and come together again. But it didn’t seem like her faith was going to pay off.

“Nya,” he said.

“Just go! Just go! Get the f**k out of here! Go on your little trip! Go live your life, Archer, that’s what you want to do. Go!”

It wasn’t like she gave him much of a choice to do anything else. Despite his tension, Nya couldn’t appease him. Letting him pivot and stalk out of the office, full of his own attitude, Nya had to accept that it wasn’t her place to soothe him anymore.

He wanted her to look out for number one and Nya started to think about doing just that.