I spun around. “Clearly you have something to say. Jay’s not here. Say it, come on.”
His heel caught on the edge of the stoop. He stumbled. I briefly felt bad for him.
“Why are you even here?”
“I didn’t know you worked here.”
“How convenient!”
His eyes dropped to his shoes then sprung up. “You know how fucking crushed Jay was about you wanting to be open?”
“Don’t do that.”
“You’re asking what my problem is.” He shrugged. “I’m telling you my problem.”
“That has nothing to do with you.”
People moved around us on the sidewalk, swaddled in the deep pink of their private worlds. Tristan shook his head. “You weren’t even there those weeks after. I was. I—”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“We worked through it.”
He blinked. “And how do you work through telling someone they’re not enough for you?”
“What the fuck? That’s not what—”
“By the way, you were thousands of miles away, all right? I was the one who had to hear about that shit for weeks. You knew he wouldn’t say anything. He loves you too much. But I don’t love you. I’m not afraid to tell you what you did was fucked.”
“What I did? I didn’t do anything. I told him the truth about how I felt.”
“You felt you wanted to fuck other people?” He laughed. “That’s not how relationships work.”
Someone turned to look at us then kept walking. I was hot with humiliation.
“You don’t know anything,” I croaked, “about relationships or about me and Jay.”
He watched me carefully. “I know more than you think.”
The restaurant door opened. Rah appeared with a dishrag over his shoulder. “You good?”
We said, “Yes.”
He looked at Tristan then turned inside. Tristan stared at his back. An electric scooter zipped in our path. Tristan grabbed my wrist and pulled me out of the way with the same cool pragmatism with which he’d wrapped my hair behind my ear. The nerve endings along my arm lit up, a hundred neon signs in the seedy part of town buzzing a bright red “OPEN.”
I wrenched myself from his grip. He looked surprised that he’d touched me.
“Ever think maybe you’re so protective of Jay, not because you don’t trust me, but because you don’t trust yourself?”
I hadn’t even meant to say it. Or I’d said it to see what he’d say.
He glared at me. He started to speak then changed his mind.
When he charged into the restaurant—the door springing back on its hinges, sending the fall menu fluttering to the ground—I watched him, heart thundering, through the glass.
Chapter 10
