Whoa. Total change of subject I wasn’t prepared for. Here I was thinking about him kissing me. I opened my mouth, but it took me a few seconds to answer. “I really . . . really wasn’t thinking.”

He picked up a strand of my hair, twisting it around his fingers. “Babe, I don’t think there’s ever truly a moment when we’re not thinking.”

I averted my gaze as I chewed on my lower lip. Thinking back to the moment Henry had grabbed my arm, there was a lot in my head. So much that it felt like there was nothing. My chest tightened.

Reece dropped my hair and ran his finger over my lower lip, startling a gasp out of me . . . and a response. “I hate him,” I blurted out, feeling the words swell inside me like a blood promise. “I seriously hate him, Reece. I never really hated someone before, but when I see him, I want . . . I want him to hurt like Charlie hurt. That’s what I was thinking when I threw the book.”

The lines of his face softened. “Roxy . . .”

“I know it’s wrong.” I closed my eyes, exhaling slowly. “I know what I did wasn’t that much different than what Henry did.”

“No,” he argued, and when I opened my eyes, he was staring at me intently. “What you did was throw a book at a windshield, not at him. Henry picked up a rock and threw it at the back of Charlie’s head when you two walked away.”

I flinched.

“You never had any intentions of harming Henry,” he went on as he kept swiping his thumb along the hem of my cami. “And if Henry really didn’t mean to do the kind of damage he did to Charlie, he still made the conscious decision to throw that rock at him. Not at the ground or a nearby car. He threw it at another living being. You’d never do that.”

Cold air whirled its way down my chest, into my stomach. The thing was, I wasn’t too sure of that. When I had tasted that anger, that red-­hot bitter anger, I knew I was capable of doing something heinous. Everyone was capable of it; some moral compass ingrained in me had prevented it, but would it always stop me? If I saw Henry again, there was a good chance I’d lose my cool once more, and really, how did that make me any better than him?

“Deep thoughts,” I murmured, edgy from where my thoughts were heading.

His lips quirked up at the corners as his thumb brushed against the thin sliver of skin exposed under the hem now. The touch was like an electric shot. “Yeah, too deep for four in the morning.”

Reece’s tone was light, but everything in me was heavy. It was like a door being unlocked inside my head. Painful memories of the night with Charlie and Henry were unleashed. They stacked up inside me, like a tower about to topple over. They started with what I had done, the verbal rock I had thrown, that had started it all.