“Dammit, Jay! Stop!” Julien shouts.
Crossing the threshold, I come up short when I see broken glass on the floor and a hole the size of a cantaloupe punched through the drywall.
No Ryder. No Liz. A pissed-off Jayson who almost steamrolled over me. And a disheveled Julien.
“What’s going on?”
I block the doorway when Julien tries to circumvent me in pursuit of his brother. The place looks like a fight just went down, and he’s my first concern. If Jayson laid a finger on him, I’ll kick his ass.
Jayson went from drowning his pain in the bottom of a liquor bottle to using his fists to deal with his emotions. He took up boxing and participates in the local fight club—a term I use loosely for the group of guys who get together just to pound the shit out of one another for kicks.
“Did he hit you?”
“What? No.”
I give his face a thorough perusal. I don’t see any swelling, bruising, or blood.
“Where’s Liz?” I ask.
Julien scrapes his hands through his hair, making the ends stick up at odd angles. “I don’t know. Ryder called and said he saw her in the student union. She bolted when he tried to talk to her. And now, the asshole won’t answer his phone. Jay lost it.”
That’s clearly obvious based on the destruction he left.
Julien lifts worried, red-rimmed eyes. “What do we do? I can’t just stand around and do nothing. I need to know that she’s okay.Fuck.”
I take his tear-ravaged face between my hands and promise him, “We’ll find her. You’ll see her again. I think the best thing to do is to wait for Ryder.”
Julien throws his arms around me and buries his face in my neck. I hold him as tightly as possible, breathing in the fresh scent of soap clinging to his skin from the shower he took after his morning run.
“He better call soon,” he says.
“He will. In the meantime, help me clean things up. I’ll sweep up the glass if you want to find something to patch the hole in the wall.”
It’s the only thing I can think of to distract him and give him something to focus on while we wait. I refuse to jump back into old habits where sex offered him a few minutes reprieve.
Julien’s chest vibrates with a soft chuckle. “Fucking Jayson. There goes our security deposit.”
Their parents are paying for the condo. Mr. and Mrs. Jameson aren’t going to be happy.
I rub soothing circles over his back until the tension melts away under my touch. “I’m sure YouTube has a DIY that can show us how to repair drywall.”
Julien leans back in the cradle of my arms, and I drown in his gorgeous silver-gray eyes. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
Threading my fingers with his, I kiss the tip of his nose before lightly brushing my lips across his plush mouth. “No place I’d rather be.”
My brain is bursting with questions I want to ask him, but I stack them in a neat pile in the corner of my mind for later. Right now, Julien needs me to be the calm in the chaos. It’s a rolethat’s easy to slip back into because I’d played it enough over the last year and a half.
“Where’s that dry sweeper thingy?”
“Kitchen pantry. Can you grab the blue painter’s tape as well? Top shelf, left. I’ll cover the hole with that. How was move-in day?”
Julien’s wariness over David hasn’t lessened, but he doesn’t get in the way of our friendship.
“Didn’t take too long. Their place is nice. Three bedrooms and two-and-a-half baths.”
Carefully navigating around the glass shards scattered over the laminate wood floor, I go into the kitchen and sigh at the stack of dishes and pans in the sink. I contemplate loading the dishwasher before I tell my feet to keep moving. Like I said, old habits.
Finding what I need in the pantry, I toss Julien the tape and get to work on sweeping the floor. Most of the shards are big, but it’s the tiny, jagged slivers that will embed into the soles of your feet that I need to make sure I get. After I sweep, I’ll go over everything with the vacuum.
