Page 80 of Apparently, I’m A B!tch

Chapter41

Tristan

Wednesday night

Lilly,Shawn and I closed the shop, and I sent Lilly home to get some rest. Her green eyes winked up at me with exhaustion, and my chest squeezed to see her like that. It reminded me of the devastatingly honest looks Nikki gave me while we grieved my mother together.

With Extra Shot empty and prepped for tomorrow’s changes, all that was left to do was rest.

I turned back to my shop, taking in the black wall paint, canvases and gray furniture. Resting wasn’t an option for me.

Instead of locking myself away in my studio and working on my latest painting, I switched the lights back on and went to the first canvas, lifting it from the wall and setting it on top of the plastic tarp we laid on the ground once the customers had filed out.

Earlier this afternoon, Nikki’s mother sat me down and listened, truly listened, as I explained everything that happened between Nikki and me.

“So, this Rochelle is lying about the two of you?” she asked, fingers wrapped around her mug of coffee.

“I didn’t lay a finger on her, Emi. I just… made a mistake when I took her up on her offer. I shouldn’t have gone on that first date. If I just listened to Lilly and Shawn, I would’ve never gotten into this mess.”

She lifted a shoulder. “You weren’t to know. And there is not much you can do to convince Nikki of that. All you can do is prove you care about her.”

“How do I do that when she won’t speak to me?”

She sat and smiled, giving me advice that was so simple, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. With all else that was happening, I never stopped to think about where and why things went wrong between us.

It started months ago, back when I bought this place without Nikki knowing. I blindsided her with changes that weren’t true to this place, weren’t true to us. I threw her in here without warning, and when she was embarrassed by her honesty, I was too busy licking my wounds to see what it did to her.

I couldn’t erase that day, or anything that happened since then. And maybe I didn’t want to.

Because of that awkward shift in our relationship, I understood how miserable I was without her, and I found the nerve to show her how I really felt. I now knew what she tasted like, smelled like, felt like, and I’d never be able to regret the moments that earned me those experiences.

The only thing I regret is hurting her.

I should’ve been honest from the second I saw her beautiful cheeks turn pink. Once she realized she barbed me with her honesty, I should’ve taken her into my arms and reassured her it was okay.

Now that it was closing time and I was alone, my mind was more focused than it’d been in weeks. I worked silently until the front door opened and shut, the sound making me startle.

I groaned as Uncle Henry called out, “Tristan? What you doing, boy?”

I didn’t look down at him. Now that I had a plan to show Nikki how much I cared about her honesty, I had to keep going. “I can’t stop, Amo. I need to do this now. Every second without Nikki is driving me crazy.”

He clucked his tongue. “You are already crazy, boy. Is not new.”

There was a pause as he watched me work, the only sounds in the shop were the thuds of canvases falling against the tarp and Uncle Henry’s random grunts.

“You know, I came here because Lilly told me you not teaching class on Sunday.”

I took down the final canvas and set it on the tarp. “You can still go. Maybe now that I’m not teaching it, Nikki will take you again.”

He huffed. “Why do you let them do this to you, boy?”

“What else can I do? They fired me.”

I turned to see his hands clenching as he stepped closer, minding his bad hip as he moved. “You can do plenty. What would your mother do? Or your father?”

I shrugged, at a loss. My mother was a private person. She was the kind of person who kept things to herself, the opposite of the woman I fell in love with. If my mother knew Nikki refused to stop talking to me because I kept some things from her, she would’ve told me not everything needed to be shared, that Nikki was being unreasonable.

And if my mother was in this sort of situation with her career, I could only imagine she’d manage exactly as I was. She would make do, just as she did when she and my father migrated here. She would accept her situation and move on.