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“I don’t want him to hurt you.”
He lets out a disbelieving laugh.
“Can I at least get a drink?” But he’s already in my kitchen. He knows where everything is. The vodka in the freezer, what refrigerator drawer holds the limes, where I keep his favorite rocks glass...
“Help yourself.” Whatever keeps him from tromping downstairs and earning a black eye and a fat lip from the bad boy of the NFL. I carry my empty wineglass to the kitchen and North refills it for me.
“I meant what I said.” He’s trying for nice after behaving like a complete ass.
“I know you did,” I reply flatly. I take a guzzle of my wine. “I’m not interested.”
“In a relationship or my friendship?”
I’m not feeling magnanimous at the moment, so I answer, “Neither.”
Barrett
I drum my fingers on the steering wheel as I watch the front door of the apartment building and wait for North’s grand exit. I also have my eye on his pretentious, rich-boy Cadillac. The vanity plates read: NORTHROP3
What a prick.
Showing Kitty Cat my fucked-up column was humbling and a little embarrassing, but I was desperate. After pecking away for nearly six hours, I wasn’t sure which was crossed—a wire in my brain or my eyes. Probably my brain.
Dyslexia’s a bitch.
No, I’m not exaggerating. I have it. It’s like I always imagined people who wear glasses feel. The letters literally trade places after I’ve stared too long and I can’t tell if I typed it that way or if my brain is interpreting it wrong. I came over here expecting her to tell me I’d written the word three instead of there or renamed her Catrina instead of Catarina.
I was diagnosed when I was a kid, so I can’t blame my affliction on a hard hit on the field. In college I routinely pulled all-nighters to do what most of my friends did in an hour or two. I missed a lot of keggers which is probably why I was recruited by Miami. If I’d gone to half the parties I was invited to, chances are I’d be sitting in jail…or lying in a morgue.
Kitty Cat said I over-edited. Who knew that was a thing? Something else for me to Google, I guess. Not tonight, though. Everything reads like hieroglyphics.
The revolving door spins and deposits a couple into the parking lot. I hold my breath, but no one else comes out. I tell myself I only care for Catarina’s sake, but I’m pissed about North’s horrible timing as much as I am my own.
Why did I kiss her?
Simple. I was towed in by caramel-colored eyes, and the pink tongue wetting her lips. By that soft-as-sin hair and the way she shushed me as she read my column. The way she let me in and offered me a beer. The way she hung up on North and smiled at me, so damn proud of herself.
I didn’t plan on the kiss as a way of staking territory or getting her into bed. I was dragged in by every elemental, beautiful nuance about her.
And then her dickhead ex stormed in behaving like...well, like me.
I did that once when Beth and I were “on a break.” She’d been ignoring my messages and I knew she had a late test. Before I knew it, I was standing in the doorway of her college dorm room. She was in there with a guy from her psychology class. His shirt was too rumpled for my taste, so I balled my fists into his rumpled shirt and shoved him into the hallway so hard he fell on his ass. Then I decided Beth and I weren’t on a break and doled out a punishing kiss. Sex followed because that was how we solved problems.
I bob my foot impatiently as the door circles again. This time a man exits...who isn’t North.
Fuck.
Several weeks’ dry spell plus a vulnerable Catarina, plus her territorial ex doesn’t add up to a patient Barrett Fox. Are they in there right now, working things out the way Beth and I used to?
I can either sit here until he exits an hour from now, with his shirt untucked and his hair crimped in the pattern of her fingers, or I can put myself out of my misery and go home. I have no claim over Catarina. The kiss I gave her barely qualified as a kiss.
But dammit.
It was a good one.
Chapter 13
Catarina
