“Thank you, BB. That was soo helpful,” Caelyx crowed, in the voice he reserved for when he was pretending to be me. He loved to demonstrate these hypothetical conversations between himself and an imaginary version of me, usually when I hadn’t given him the answer he’d wanted. “Oh, you’re welcome, Cupcake,” he switched back to his normal voice as he answered himself. “Your gratitude means so much to me.”
Inhaling deeply, I shot him a dry look. “The me in your head calls you baby?”
“BB,” he corrected, blinking his lashes at me. He had a cluster of golden freckles concentrated just across the bridge of his nose, a perfect complement to the golden shade of his hair. Couple that with his hollow cheeks and defined jaw, and he could easily be a model in some preppy, rich boy fashion magazine. “It stands for Best Boyfriend.”
“You’re unstable.”
“Stables are for cows.”
“Horses,” I corrected him, resisting the urge to pinch the bridge of my nose to ward off what was surely an impending headache. “Horses sleep in stables. Cows don’t.”
“Whatever,” he said, waving off my assertion. “Anyway, the you in my mind is a little ahead of the physical you in terms of processing your feelings for me,” he explained, without a hint of irony or humor in his voice. Psychopath.
“I’ve processed my feelings for you,” I assured him flatly. “We’d finish faster if you quit yapping.”
“I know, but I so cherish these moments between us,” he said, before giving a big dramatic sigh. “But if this isn’t enough for you and you just can’t wait to be in the car with me…”
Anytime we worked a shift together, he would grab a ride with me to and from the café. His house was between my dorm and our work, so it wasn’t really any extra effort anyway. If he wasn’t on shift with me, he walked, which still wasn’t too bad. The neat little coastal town of Byron Bay was small and dense with shops and restaurants, very walkable. The university we both attended was smack dab between that downtown district and a beach, with a big ass boardwalk always swarmed with tourists.
“Yeah, that’s it. You caught me.”
“I get it,” he said, easing past me to wipe up more surfaces. “It can be erotic, right? Crammed up in the car together. Barely any space between us, breathing each other in. Maybe we reach out to adjust the radio volume at the same time and our hands brush.”
“How about you walk home from now on,” I suggested, staring pointedly down at a grinder lid as I wiped coffee grounds off it. It was a bluff, and we both knew it. I wasn’t going to make him walk home.
Caelyx was from a rich family. Like, stupidly rich. His family owned a multi-billion dollar company, Vane Corporation, an empire that branched out in all directions like retail and real estate and tech. But after acting like a dipshit one too many times, Caelyx’s dad had ended up cutting him off and booting him off to college, telling him not to come back until he showed some initiative to prove he wouldn’t squander the family fortune. That’s what Caelyx had explained to me when I’d finally asked, anyway.
I’d grown up in a trailer wearing thrifted clothes with half my meals coming from a local food bank and the other half purchased with the pathetic allowance of food stamps my single mom was granted by our state’s welfare system. He’d have died if he’d had to live my life.
I didn’t exactly feel sympathy for his situation, but being around him was kind of like watching a spoiled house cat who’d never had to hunt for his own food abandoned in the wild. If I didn’t help, he’d slowly starve. I wasn’t a heartless asshole. I wasn’t going to let some brainless cat starve to death just because no one had ever taught it how to be a cat before. Even if it did happen to be the most deliberately irritating cat on the planet.
“Aw,” he whined, but it was the mocking whine of someone who already knew they weren’t in any real danger. “You’re not really going to make me walk, are you?”
“Don’t try me, Gucci boy.”
“If I’m Gucci boy, then you’re Goodwill boy,” he retorted easily.
“Why don’t you get one of your little girlfriends that hang around the store all day to drive you home?” I said, opening up the fridge to take note of the milks.
“Don’t get jealous, Cupcake. You know that’s just business.”
I snorted, rolling my eyes as I whirled around, ready to snap back about how he could only wish I would ever care enough to actually feel jealousy over his horde of pathetic admirers. But when I turned, I collided with him, smacking into his body with mine. I scrambled back, startled, into the solid surface of the refrigerator, my heart racing in my chest. He was warm and sculpted with lean muscles. If he had been anyone else, I might have lingered on him just a little bit to enjoy the feel, and maybe even commented on it to flirt a little, but he wasn’t someone else. He was Caelyx fucking Vane.
“Careful,” he suggested, obviously amused by my reaction. Heat rose up to the surface of my cheeks at his expression, and I shoved at him again, only managing to move him back a few inches. But that was enough to let me breathe, at least.
“Have I mentioned that I hate you?”
“You know, they say there’s a fine line between love and hate.”
His tone was light, but the general smugness in his expression was irritating as always.
“Hate and love are on opposite ends of the emotional spectrum,” I retorted. “They’re nowhere near the same.”
He tilted his head, watching me closely for just a bit too long before speaking again.
“Two sides of the same coin. It’s easier to confuse them than you might think.”
“Can you go do something useful?” I snapped, pretending like I needed to wipe down the counter again just so I could turn away from him. His eyes made me feel too exposed, and I wasn’t interested in debating semantics.
