I’m grinning as I pull my cell phone from my pocket and hit speed dial. After giving Juniper’s workplace another glance, I head for the coffee shop down the street to warm up on this cool morning.
“What?” Torin demands, half-asleep.
“She wants to watch a movie and eat Chinese food tonight. And, uh, we need to clean up. She wants to do it at our apartment. Tell Callum once he’s back from the house.” It’s his turn to stay at the house. As long as one of us is there, at least some of the time, Callum’s dad and Torin’s mom won’t think we’ve run and hurt Lottie to get us to come back.
“She?”
A bell rings as I push the coffee shop door open, the smell of coffee, hazelnut, and pastries making my stomach rumble. “Juniper. Who the fuck do you think I’m talking about?”
The sound of fabric rustling fills my ears. Torin must be getting up. “As friends?”
There’s a hopeful note in Torin’s voice.
I’m smiling like an idiot as I tell him. “If it were as friends, she wouldn’t have told me to call her June before she went into work.”
“She told you to call her June?”
“Yup.”
Torin’s silence is heavy. Heavy in the way that I don’t just know, I feel his excitement that we might have a future with Juniper—June—after all, stretching down the phone line. Calling her June is a big deal. People she trusts call her June; people she does not trust, and maybe doesn’t like at all, she’s Juniper.
“What can I get you?” the blonde college-aged barista asks with a smile.
“Give me a second,” I tell Torin over the phone. “I’m ordering some food.” Lowering my phone, I scan the menu above her head and give my order.
After I’ve walked Juniper—June—to work, I usually grab a coffee and a breakfast sandwich, then wander for a bit or head back to the apartment or the house until it’s time to come back to the hotel.
“A cappuccino and ham and cheese toasted sandwich,” I tell the barista, fishing my wallet from my back pocket. “And I’m eating here.”
Once I’ve paid, I take a seat when she says she’ll bring it over.
Maybe I could grab June a sandwich and a hot drink from here and suggest I drive her home after work instead of taking the bus.
Bus rides are not my favorite. I’ve gotten far too used to the space and the privacy of driving everywhere, but the bus journey home takes more out of June, especially after being on her feet all day, than it takes out of me.
“You still there?” I ask Torin, since he’s been quiet for a while.
“I’ll head back to the house and watch Veronica while you hang out with Juniper tonight,” he says.
“She specifically said your name as well.”
“She doesn’t want me there.”
“You realize there’s a point where you have to stop loudly and repeatedly kicking your own ass, right?” I ask him, and mouth thanks at the server when she sets my drink and sandwich down on my table. “The loudness is the part that pisses me off the most.”
But that isn’t true. Grow up surrounded by poison, courtesy of a toxic mom and dad, and it isn’t long before you start believing you’re poison too. That’s Torin.
“What did she say?” he asks.
“I thought you weren’t interested in coming, given that?—”
“Tell me,” he snaps.
Smiling, I take a sip of my coffee and repeat the conversation I had with June before she went to work. He knows what we talked about the night I stayed over at her place already. I filled him in when I strolled into our apartment yesterday morning, and he took one look at me, guessed what we’d been up to, and I swear he wanted to be me.
“When did you threaten to kill the guy?” he asks, reminding me that I might have left out the part where I threatened to kill Jack. I wasn’t proud of myself for doing that, so I kept it to myself. Now, I’m willing to admit it. Mainly because I haven’t stopped smiling since I left June’s apartment.
“That’s your first question?” I ask dryly.
