Abite of nervous energy clenched my stomach as my phone vibrated next to me.
When I woke up this morning, Peter was the first thing on my mind. He said he'd call today, but so many annoying voices in my head told me he might not, that he might stand me up before we ever even went out on a date. Every time my phone buzzed that morning, I experienced the same nervous clench that I was now.
With anxious fingers, I flipped my phone over to see the name on the screen.
My hand snatched away from the phone like it had bitten me as I made out the last name I wanted to see lighting up my phone. Even seeing his name brought my body to a full-stop aside from my heart. Yes, Daniel still made my heart race away in my chest, except that now that racing was fueled by stress and a blazing fury.
I hated being reminded of him. I hated being forced to think of him and hear his voice. I hated that he knew I would pick up.
"Why are you calling me?" I asked first thing.
"You know these conversations don't always have to start off so hostile, right?"
His voice. God, it slinked through me and up my spine, reaching its hands around my skull and crushed down with all its might. Only a few seconds of talking to him and I already had a headache.
"Because you only call me if you need something. So what do you need, Daniel?"
A sigh cut through the phone. "You know I still care about you, right? Sometimes I think about you and want to make sure you're okay and maybe, just maybe that's why I'm calling now."
Alone in my bedroom, I dropped my face into my free hand and pulled the phone away from my mouth. I didn't want Daniel to be able to hear the onset of staggered breathing he'd just caused with those words. My eyes closed, I focused on deleting them from my memory. I didn't want them. They would stain my brain and seep through to my heart, rotting it from the inside out if I believed them.
"I don't want you to care about me," I said slowly. "I don't need you to care about me."
Daniel's voice lowered to one I was all too familiar with, and I gasped for breath like his voice was a hand, shoving me underwater.
"You've always needed me to care about you, Amber."
His simple words knocked the wind right out of me, caving my breastbone back to meet my spine. My lungs searched for air as silently as they could, but my brain wasn't exactly helping. It was busy fighting off his words and the terrifying truth that came with them.
In a rush, I mumbled, "I'm hanging up."
"Don't do that," Daniel's voice hit. "Come on, can we just have one normal conversation, please?"
"Why would I want to do that?"
"So that we can not hate each other? So that we can act like adults instead of stupid teenagers?"
I found my breath again as the word hate struck me. "You don't have any reason to hate me. I didn't do anything to you."
Daniel tried to muffle his groan on the other side of the phone, but I still heard it.
"It's not about who did what to whom. It's about getting over it and moving on with our lives, Amber, and I want that for you."
Whom. I hated when he did stuff like that, just to remind whoever he was talking to that he thought he was smarter than them.
"I am moving on and I don't need your blessing to do it, so can we end this call now?"
I was two seconds away from hanging up when he said one of the few things he could have to stop me.
YOU ARE READING
Tempting /A Jordan Knight fanfic ✔️
Fanfiction(Completed) All my life, I had worked tirelessly to achieve perfection. Perfection was in my blood, and so was the art of dance. All that hard work had earned me my dream job as a professional dancer at the ripe age of twenty-four, the perfect boyf...
