AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Trine
It’s almost six o’clock when I get back to my apartment. I can barely keep myself upright as I slowly make my way to my door, Dev only a few steps behind me. He’s chuckling under his breath and when I look back at him, I see him holding himself up against the wall.
He coughs a little as I try to fish my keys out of my pocket. "Are you sure…is this the right apartment?" he asks, his speech slurred.
I shush him. "I know my apartment!" I exclaim, but when I try to put the key into the lock, I fumble, and nothing happens. I’m about to second guess myself when the door opens wide, a smile on Bryony’s face. She’s wearing a tank top and shorts, no make-up on her face, her hair up in a messy bun.
She looks past me. "Dev!" she says warmly. "Come in. I wasn’t expecting you."
Dev walks past me and throws his arm around her, holding her close. "We went for emergency mimosas," he says. "We would’ve invited you, but it had to happen immediately. But now…we’re here, and we can get crossfaded."
She laughs. Dev walks into our living room, but before I can go with him, Bryony wraps her hand around my wrist. "Wait," she says. "It didn’t go well?"
I shake my head. "He was using me," I spit out. I might’ve been shy about it in the morning, but it’s all I’ve been thinking about all day, and I’ve gotten progressively angrier about it. I thought speaking about it with Dev would help me process things. It has. The result of my process is just pure, unadulterated anger. "He was using me all along."
"I mean, it was one night…"
"Shut up, Bryony!" Dev says from the kitchen, opening the fridge to look for snacks. "Leave her alone. He was the first person who offered to eat her ass."
Bryony giggles, and I roll my eyes. "You said you weren’t going to tell her the details!"
"I didn’t realize that part was a secret," he says, shaking his head. "And you did also say you were going to tell her everything on the way here."
I groan. He’s right, I did. Bryony isn’t asking me questions and I can tell it’s killing her.
"He was hot, and nice, and I thought we might make it something, you know, regular," I say. "But it turns out he wanted to find out if I still, you know…"
I point toward my head, as if that’s supposed to mean I’m possessed. As if there’s a universal gesture for being possessed. Bryony gasps. We’re standing around the kitchen island as Dev grabs a bunch of yogurts and sliced cheese, piling it on top of the counter in front of him. "There’s nothing salty here," he says, sounding truly upset about it.
"There’s…cheese is salty," Bryony says, grabbing me by the arm and ushering me toward the second-hand sectional we bought from a college student leaving the city. "While Dev decides what he wants to eat, will you tell me what happened?"
"He took me out for food; he was hot, interesting, super nice. He asked me if he could touch me. He wouldn’t look down my shirt without me explicitly asking him to."
"Oh my God."
"Right," I say, wetting my lips. "And he kept asking me what I wanted him to do while he was fucking me, and it was so fucking sexy."
She sighs, groaning and throwing her head back. "Oh, no," she says. "How did he ruin it? Because this sounds amazing so far."
"His boss told me he came to me to find answers."
"Answers about…"
Oh shit. I should’ve realized that telling her about this—telling either of them about this—was going to lead to questions about what I’d seen at the restaurant. "It’s a long story," I say. "The long and short of it is that he was just using me and I—"
My phone vibrates in the pocket of my jeans, distracting me. And then it keeps vibrating, and vibrating, and vibrating. This is weird. No onecallsme. They text me, like civilized people.
I fish my phone out of my pocket and look at the numbers on the screen. I blocked Rei, so I don’t think it’s him, but I think this is the same area code as his number.
"Oh, is that him?" Bryony asks. "I’m going to give him a piece of my mind."
She snatches the phone out of my hand before I can tell her that I don’t want to speak to him, that this is a bad idea, that I’ve spent almost all day trying to forget about the sound of his voice and the way his chest rumbled when he said my name, and the way he smelled like pine aftershave and—
"Hello?" Bryony says, her fingers swiping over the number pad until she puts him on speaker. "Is this the hot guy with the glasses?"
"What?" Misha asks. "No, it’s—may I speak to Trine, please?"
"She’s here, and she doesn’t want anything to do with any of you," she says. "She’s not sleeping with him again and she’s definitely not sleeping with you."
