“Not mine,” he responded, injecting that melodramatic wistfulness into his voice like he always did when he wanted attention from me. He must have known I wasn’t taking his bait this time, because he went on before I even had a chance to ignore him. “See, I’m having this problem.”
My fingers clenched on the steering wheel, but I bit down into the end of my tongue to keep from saying anything. It wasn’t fair that I was basically punishing him for my own stupidity, but I didn’t know what else to do. It was like he was my personal patch of deadly quicksand, dragging me down to certain destruction whether I liked it or not.
“My problem is that there’s this guy. And I really like this guy.”
When my gaze slid over to him, I expected him to blow me a kiss or raise his eyebrows or some other stupid thing, but he only stared back at me with an intensity in his eyes that I wasn’tused to seeing. Looking away back toward the road, I felt a shiver snake up my spine.
“And last night, this thing happened with this guy.”
“Caelyx, I will drive us into a tree.”
I heard his snort, but didn’t look back over at him. I could feel heat crawling up my skin, turning me red all over.
“The thing is, I think the guy I likethinksthat I want to talk about this thing that happened. And he really, really doesn’t want to talk about it. I can tell, I kind of have a sixth sense about these things,” he tacked on, and I had to bite down into my tongue again to keep from laughing. He was so smug and irritating, it should have been illegal. But he made it too easy for me to relax around him. That was half the reason I’d acted like such an embarrassing idiot the night before. Half.
“So I just really need to make sure he understands that if he wants to talk about anything then I’m good to talk, but if he doesn’t, we don’t have to talk about it. Like, ever,” he went on. “And we can just pretend like nothing happened, if that makes it easier for him. Do you… Have any advice on how I should communicate that to him?”
“How should I know?” I answered, knowing I was being a dick for basically no reason. But my heart was beating a little faster in my chest. He was making it so easy for me. He wasn’t going to tease me about it or push me into discussing something I wasn’t comfortable with. He just wanted to let it go and we could move on, so things didn’t have to change.
“Well, you and the guy I like are kind of similar, so I thought you might have some insight.”
Since when were we just saying welikedpeople so fucking casually? What exactly did he expect from me? To lean over the console and kiss him? To send him heart emojis at night before I went to sleep just to check in?
The café was slammed, so I had to pull into a far back corner of the lot to park. I turned off the car, pulling the key from the ignition, and the silence settled around us as he stared at me expectantly. My heartbeat was at full rampage now, and my throat was dry and scratchy when I swallowed. I felt like I was on the verge of a panic attack, but I was pretty sure I couldn’t handle any more emotional damage at the moment, so I had to bite it back.
“Can we just work?” I finally asked, and his eyebrows popped up a little bit before he nodded.
“If that’s what you want.”
If that’s what you want.The words rattled around in my frenetic, overstimulated brain while I tried to focus on the sound of my soles smacking the asphalt as we hurried in.
Why was it always like that? It was always him giving me whatever I wanted. Making things easier for me, pushing when I needed it, backing off when I needed it. Taking charge when we hooked up, making sure I was taken care of. How long would it take for him to wise up and realize that he was giving everything and I was giving nothing? And when he did realize it, how would he react? Would he call me out on wasting so much of his time and energy when he wasn’t getting anything out of me?
The thought of that made me nauseous, but it was just another example of how my life had always been. I could never be what anyone wanted me to be. I was always either too much, or not enough.
Luckily, our entire shift was so busy that the time flew by, and we didn’t have a single minute alone. The hours flew by in a haze of steamed milk and cold foam, with the dining area full of chatty customers. As everything wound down to a close, I stood at the espresso machine waiting for the cup to fill for a customer’s latte, while Caelyx punched buttons on the POS system at the cash register, ringing the order up.
I was mostly zoned out, stuck in the black cloud of my own thoughts, until I heard a girl’s voice raise to just slightly too high of a pitch as she chatted with him. I slowly turned and saw her leaning on the counter, peering up at him through her lashes as she talked.
“You remember me, right?” She prompted him, and he cleared his throat, but that dazzling, pearly fuckboy grin didn’t even remotely fade at the awkward question.
“Why don’t you remind me? My memory’s not so good.”
“You came to this party at my friend’s house last year!” She said. “We were all in the hot tub.”
“Oh,” he said, and it seemed likethatdetail had stood out in his mind a bit, at least. “Your friend is Olivia, right?”
“Yeah, exactly,” She said, tapping her fingernail on the counter. “We did a bunch of those lemon drop shots together, remember?”
“Ah…”
“I had on a red bikini,” she added, and I watched his gaze dip down from her face to her prominently displayed cleavage for a second before snapping back up. He scratched the back of his neck, letting out a polite chuckle.
“Ah, yep, I do remember now.”
Trying not to let my molars grind into dust as I clenched my jaw, I carefully poured the frothed milk into her latte cup, lowering and angling it as it dripped out.
“You ended up staying the night with Olivia,” she added. “I had a boyfriend then, but I wassojealous I couldn’t stay.”
