Now, I grab my water and try to sneak past them.
“Alex!”
I stop.
Mike’s friends have gone quiet, looking at me with way too much curiosity for my liking. “Come meet the guys.”
“I’m tired,” I say, already starting up the stairs again.
He pouts this time, full on, pursing those stupidly kissable lips, and I have to get away from him. “Okay.” He always says that. No problem. But this time, he sounds a little down.
The girl with the fuchsia hair gives me a small wave, and the guy raises his chin in a greeting.
I nod back to both of them before I make my retreat, wondering, not for the first time, why I did this to myself.
Ryan comes over on Thursday after class, because having someone else in the house makes it easier to exist here. Sorta like a buffer.
We’ve been playing Xbox for an hour, a shooter game Ryan chose, and he’s winning by enough that I’ve started to lose interest. But that’s fine. This is exactly the kind of normal evening I should be having, and I’m doing okay.
Not thinking aboutanyone.
I’ve started to relax for the first time all week when I hear footsteps on the stairs.
Mike strolls into the living room wearing the shortest shorts I’ve ever seen on another dude, drawing my attention to his pale thighs and the tattoo of a black cat—
I have to physically redirect my eyes toward the television screen.
“Hey,” Mike says, easy, resting onto the arm of the couch beside me. Touching my arm with the outside of his leg as he glances at the screen and then at Ryan. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Mike.”
Ryan doesn’t even acknowledge him.
Mike doesn’t seem to notice, or if he does, he doesn’t show it. He looks back at the TV. “You guys wanna watch a movie after this round? I was thinking about ordering a pizza.”
That plan sounds amazing. Watching a movie with him, eating pizza. Hanging out the way roommates do. The part of me that I keep trying to suffocate is begging to say yes.
Is going to.
“We were actually just leaving,” Ryan says, already reaching for his jacket, even though he wasn’t planning on going anywhere thirty seconds ago.
“Oh,” Mike says, something shifting in his expression. “Alright. No worries.”
He looks at me then, a question in his eyes that feels bigger than pizza and a movie. A line I can step over or draw completely.
I put my controller down.
“Yeah,” I say. “We should head out.”
Mike nods once, standing up from the arm of the couch. I make the mistake of looking at him when he does.
The tank top he’s wearing rides up when he moves, and I see a sliver of pale skin above the waistband of his shorts, a hint of the star tattoos on his hips at eye level.
I look very hard at the door.
“Have fun,” he says, and it would sound neutral to someone who doesn’t overanalyze everything he says. But I hear the sigh in his voice.
Ryan is already halfway out the door before I stand up to follow him, grabbing my keys off the side table, not looking back, no matter how much I want to.
Outside, once the front door is closed behind us, Ryan starts toward my car as if nothing happened. “That dude is so weird. Did you see what he was wearing?”
