“I’m with someone, actually. Boyfriend.”
Both his eyebrows went up. “Boyfriend? You?” He laughed, surprised, not mean about it. “No offense, but when I knew you, ‘boyfriend’ wasn’t in your vocabulary.”
“Things change.”
“Clearly.” He studied me for a second, and something in his expression softened. Shifted from flirtation to something more like recognition. “Good for you, man. I mean it. He must be something if he got Jett Reyes-Villanueva to commit.”
“He is.”
Darius nodded, gave my shoulder a squeeze that lasted a beat too long, and melted back into the crowd. The whole exchange took maybe two minutes. Barely a footnote in a night out.
But when I turned around with my drink, Raven was standing three feet behind me.
“Who was that?” she asked, her dark eyes missing absolutely nothing.
“Nobody.”
“Didn’t look like nobody. Looked like somebody who knew you pretty well.”
“From before. Someone from before. It doesn’t matter.”
She held my gaze for a second, then shrugged and took her drink fromthe bartender. Raven never pushed. She filed and waited.
The rest of the night was fine. Good, even. We danced. Calliope did something inadvisable on a speaker. Sierra laughed so hard at one point that her drink came out of her nose, and I almost collapsed. For a few hours I was Jett again, not the Jett whose mom wasn’t speaking to him, not the Jett who kept a catalog of people he’d used and discarded like takeout containers. Jett, with his people, in the place where he’d always felt most free.
I got home at two. Ellis was already in my apartment; he’d taken to letting himself in with the spare key we’d moved from the fake rock to a more dignified location inside the hallway light fixture. He was asleep on the couch with his tablet on his chest and one of my blankets pulled up to his chin. He’d waited up and lost the fight.
I took the tablet off his chest and set it on the coffee table. He stirred.
“Hey.” His voice was gravel. “How was it?”
“Fun. Calliope almost got us banned from Neon Pulse again.”
He smiled without opening his eyes. “Again?”
“Long story. How was the work thing?”
“Fine. Marcus told a story about fishing in Montauk that lasted forty-five minutes.”
I kicked off my shoes and lay down beside him on the couch, which was too narrow for two people and forced us into a tangle that neither of us minded. His arm went around me automatically. His breath smelled like toothpaste, and the apartment smelled like the candle he’d been burning, smoke and amber.
“Jett?”
“Yeah?”
“You smell like someone else’s cologne.”
I went still.
“It’s on your shoulder.” He wasn’t accusing, just observing, cataloging. “The left one.”
Darius’ hand. The squeeze that lasted a beat too long.
“Someone came up to me at the bar.” I shifted in his arms, looking directly at him so he could read my honesty. “A guy I used to know. Before you. He was being friendly. Put his hand on my shoulder for like one second.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it. I told him I have a boyfriend and he walked away.”
