“Let me see.” Titus shoos Julian away, and to my utter horror, he moves.
“Wha—”
“I’ve got six sisters. I’ve done this more than I care to admit, so either sit down and let me help, or you can let Julez do it and risk looking like a purple-spotted leopard.”
He holds my stare in the mirror, the challenge in his eyes, and I’m so damn tempted to tell him to get lost, but a glance at Julian lets me know Titus is telling the truth. I saw how he was struggling, and while it seems easy enough, I’m not sure I could do it either.
“Fine,” I grumble, falling back into the chair with a groan.
“Rude,” Julian says, glaring at Titus, who remains completely unaffected.
“What are we doing here?” he asks, and Julian quickly explains how we’d settled on only doing the purple underneath, along with some of my bangs instead of my entire head. I have a lot of hair, and that just seemed like overkill.
I wasn’t trying to be Barney.
Titus, as much as I might hate to admit it, seems to know exactly what he’s doing. Julian thankfully doesn’t leave me with him, instead jumping up on the counter to watch, kicking his legs, and making easy conversation with both of us.
It’s almost nice…
Everything is going great until it’s time to wash the color out.
“You have to rinse it with cold water so that it sticks,” Titus tells me when I’m setting the temperature on the sink.
“What!?” I turn to look at Julian and see the grimace on his face; that tells me Titus is right.
UGH!
With a groan, I flip the faucet to cold and try to mentally prepare for this new hell. It doesn’t work, and when the cold water hits my scalp, I can’t stop the shriek that it pulls from me.
It’s also clear pretty quickly that the sink isn’t the best idea. My hair is thick and long and, well, everywhere.
“Alright, let's just…” Someone, I assume Julian, tosses a black towel on my head, and I hear the water shut off. “This will be a lot easier in a tub.”
He’s probably not wrong, but there’s only a shower stall.
“Up you go,” I scream as the world tilts. I quickly clamp my mouth shut when I realize he’s just picked me up. I elbow him in what I assume is his chest when I feel his chest rumble with laughter.
I move the towel enough to see where we're going but hopefully not enough to make a mess. Titus stands near the chair, looking between us as if he’s trying to understand a complicated math problem, and as much as I might not like him, I was raised with manners.
Some might say they were beaten into me…
“Thank you.”
Julian pauses, and Titus’ eyes snap to mine, his brows arched as if unsure if he’d heard me correctly, or maybe he just hadn’texpected me to thank him. Either way, I said it, and I won’t be repeating myself.
He gives a nod, and I feel Julian’s fingers dig into my thigh and arm a little more. Peeking up at him, I see his jaw is clenched, and his playful, happy smile from a moment ago is long gone.
Julian is scary when he’s angry.
He doesn’t stick around, though, instead moving into the living room and right up the stairs fast enough that I don’t even get to see if Nolan is still sitting at the table or not.
I’ve only been up here once before, and that was when I passed out during movie night, and Julian put me in his bed. I’d woken up the next morning, and he’d come in to scramble my brain with his low-slung towel and delicious lips, and I’d left in a hurry, nearly late for my meeting with Dimitri.
Which is why I do my best to look around as he goes now. There isn’t much to see, though. Art hangs on the wall, but it all looks like stuff that was probably already here from the school decorating, not that any of the guys picked. All the doors to the rooms are closed, and I know that Julian's is the last on the left, but the rest are a mystery.
Not that it really matters, but still, curiosity and all that.
Julian walks past every door to the one at the end of the hall that I have to assume is the bathroom, and…
