Then, her mouth tilts in a sly grin. I know what’s coming, and I scowl, though she’s already figured out I can’t, and won’t, do anything to stop her. Now that she and Hart are dating, she has full immunity from my assholery.
“Will you paw-lease accept my apology?”
The most I can do is scowl. Hart snickers as he scrounges up breakfast for the two of them.
I chug my orange juice, then thump the glass down. I belch, and Rylie rolls her eyes. At the beginning of the school year, she cowered when she saw me. It wasn’t until she began hooking up with Hart she grew a fucking spine. Now, she’s ditched her old major to focus on art, her bitch of a roommate to live with actual friends, and any semblance of trepidation she’d once had for me. Which, unfortunately, means she knows my impatience for her stupid cat puns—and with that great power, comes her great responsibility to rub it in my fucking face.
“Don’t you have your own bathroom?” I ask her.
Her shoulders droop. “I have to sleepover at Main Desire. We can’t go back to my place.”
Main Desire—our house, named so since it’s the first house on Main Street.
“Why the hell not?”
She blinks, like I should know the answer already. “Kennedy.”
I raise an eyebrow, not sure what her frigid bitch of a friend has to do with them not being able to fuck in a house where I don’t live.
“She still moping about Ashton?” Gray asks.
Rylie nods, pointing at Gray and giving me a look like ‘See, he gets it’.
“She tries to hide it, but she’s not over the break up yet,” Rylie says. “She’s in a funk.”
Didn’t look like that to me last night. During our bathroom interlude at The Six-Pack, all I’d gotten was indifferent coldness. Snobbish derision. Same old princess as usual.
But I keep quiet. Because if I tell Hart or his girlfriend I ran into her roommate last night and we exchanged barbed not-so-pleasantries, it’ll only end with them making me apologize. And I’m not quite ready to let bygones be bygones with someone that refuses to insult me with a word that packs more of a punch than fucking meatball.
“Yeah, Spence,” Hart wraps his arms around Rylie’s waist from behind. He waves his hands to indicate them both. “We can’t just flaunt our love before the heartbroken like that. So now you get a front-row seat. You should feel honored.” Then he honks her tits, and Rylie pushes him away with an exasperated squeal of his name.
He comes back a second later, setting a toasted cream cheese bagel in front of her and bringing around a stool across the counter from Gray and me. When he sits on the stool, she boosts herself into his lap. I watch, disturbed, as they dine off the same plate. Drink from the same glass. Hold out bits of food for the other to eat.
Fuck, now I’m the one about to blow chunks.
“Ugh,” Gray says beside me. Sure enough, the faint pallor has returned to his cheeks. He stumbles off his stool, clutching his stomach as he makes a break for the toilet.
“What’s wrong with him?” Hart asks, watching Gray leave.
I can think of a couple reasons. I scowl at them.
Rylie sees me and smiles, licking a smudge of cream cheese off her thumb. “Don’t worry, Spencer,” she says. “Kennedy’s dating again, so I’m sure it won’t be long now before she forgets about Ashton. When she does, we’ll spend more time at my house, how’s that sound?”
Like fucking paradise.
“Your house doesn’t have detachable showerheads,” Hart says. “Or my bed.”
She pats his cheek. “It has me.”
“I do like you. But I also really like my bed.”
“I have ways to purr-suade you.”
This, however, is fucking hell.
I noisily push my dirty dishes across the counter. Both of them glance up, like they forgot I’m still in the room.
“Stone,” I say. “Sort out your friend’s bullshit. Until then, stay out of my fucking shower.”
“He called me Stone,” Rylie mock-whispers to Hart.
He grins at me, though he pecks her cheek, “That means he likes you.”
I stand, grunting neither a yes nor a no.
“Nice having brunch with you, Spence. We should do this again. Same time tomorrow?” Hart calls after me.
I flip him off before stomping up the stairs. I need to hose down my bathroom.
4
Kennedy
“How far are you on the Valentine’s Day piece?” Brook asks me in our Monday meeting.
I set down my travel coffee mug—a tacky, rainbow-sparkled monstrosity that I absolutely adore, since Natalie painted it herself before gifting it to me for Christmas—and pull up the document on my laptop, as well as my color-coded schedule for all my newspaper assignments. “In the middle of drafting, but it’s coming along. I can have a rough copy for you by Thursday.”
Brook taps her pen on her own coffee cup—a paper one that I recognize from Busy Beans, the shop off-campus where I work. She leans a hip against my work station, staring out the window at the cloudy sky casting a gloom over the quad. The hoop in her bottom lip shifts as she wiggles it with her tongue.
Brook Larkins is not what I’d expected for a college paper editor-in-chief. With her shaved head, multiple piercings, and all-black wardrobe, she’d intimidated me when Ashton and I joined The Lakewood Weekly staff our freshman year. When she’d handed me back my first article, each and every sentence marked with strokes from the red pen she carries, I’d wanted to cry.
Until I read her columns. She’s a flipping talented journalist. Though she may be demanding when it comes to revisions, she knows her stuff. My own writing’s improved since she took me under her wing, and I no longer feel faint when I see red.
In a way, she reminds me of my sister Brigid—and not just because they both fancy women, have names that start with the same letter, or that when she was fifteen,
