Page 87 of My Unfinished Heart

If I say no, I’m an asshole. If I say yes, I actually have to follow through with it. The proverbial rock and the hard place.

“I’ll be right back,” I mumble. This should be interesting. If I think of it like an experiment, it has less of a chance of worsening this already terrible night.

By the time I make my way over to Connor, Jayne has disappeared, and my brother is listening patiently to Kat from Strange Days go on about his resemblance to me. Seeing me approach, Connor fixes me with an iron gaze and does not smile.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.”

“I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

“Jayne invited me,” he says, like he doesn’t care whether I like it or not.

“I didn’t realize you were still friends.”

“I bet there’s a lot of things you don’t know about me. It’s what happens when you don’t keep in touch.”

It is, but he never reached out to me, either. I thought he wanted it that way.

I sincerely doubt my ability to maintain my composure. I’m having enough trouble dealing with Tristan’s mostly unfair guilt trip. This is like—this is my worst nightmare. “Glad you could make it,” I make myself say.

“Uh-huh.”

“You look good,” I tell him, though it’s an understatement of galactic proportion. He looks amazing.

“Thank you.”

I guess I’m waiting for him to congratulate me or something—it’s my PhD party and all—but it’s a good thing I’m not holding my breath. After an awkward few moments of staring, I say, “My friend wants to meet you.” I incline my head toward the porch.

“Why?”

I suck my lips into my mouth and remind myself to be nice because there are witnesses. “Please?”

“Fine.” He turns around. “Tristan, apparently I have to go meet my brother’s friend.”

I experience the revelation of Tristan within a speaking radius the same way I experience a jump scare in a horror movie.

Tristan turns slowly away from one of my bartenders who gives me the universal ‘fuck off, cockblocker’ face. In his own body con black outfit, Tristan meets my widened eyes, and his mouth turns up in a smirk. His beauty enflames me—it takes all my breath away and then some extra, leaving me with no words of greeting.

Connor turns to go outside, but not before he’s sure Tristan is with him. Tristan brushes by me with an indifference he has to have learned from my brother who places his hand on the small of Tristan’s back.

The craving is back in full force—the deep one that scratches and scrapes. The memory of him on that bathroom counter with my body between his legs…the cool cloth on my stinging cheek…the thing he said about my face…what was it?

This face… It’s my favorite.

I’ve imagined a thousand conversations with him, and here I am, once again, without a word to say.

When we get outside, he paints on a smile for the other guests, that gentle glow he radiates still there. God, I forgot the smile. He’s fucking radiant when he brings that out. Even more now, I think. But there’s something else I never noticed before behind it. It’s something in his eyes. An uncertainty with a hint of desperation. Like he needs someone to smile at him, too. To show him he’s welcome. I glance down again at Conner’s hand on Tristan’s back. It’s flexed, like he’s ready to catch him if he falls.

Tristan is nervous in my house, and that breaks my heart.

I swallow the sick lump in the back of my throat, and I try to forget he’s here and that he has hands or lips or hair or the sexiest body I’ve ever seen. All of which he let me touch and kiss once—when he was too young to know any better.

I focus on the people in front of me and gesture toward West. “Connor, this is my best friend, West Miles.”

“Hi,” my brother says with a smile as natural as anything I’ve ever seen his face do.

“You really do have a strong resemblance,” West notes for the record.