AllFreeNovel
Share Us
That makes me want to slap him twice for good measure,I think to myself, remaining silent, only looking at Talia. Her eyes are filled with disdain as they look back at me.
I’d hoped it would have waned at least a little bit by now.
“I like my job, Brian. Don’t you have a meeting to get to?” Talia’s voice sounds well trained in the art of politeness, her tone seeping business formal without any of her normal, feisty personality.
Brian eyes me before turning away and heading back to his car. “I’ll pick you up later,” he says to Talia, who’s already heading inside.
I follow closely behind her. “Who the hell is trust fund fuckboy?” I demand.
“My boyfriend.”
“I’m sorry, you run away for a few days and come back with some rich asshole as your boyfriend?” We walk into the club, crossing the large main room, heading toward the elevator.
“It takes one to know one.”
“Very mature, Talia.”
She whirls on me just outside the elevator. “Excuse me?” Her nostrils flare, her cheeks slowly flushing red.
Good, I think, it means we’re getting back to where we started. I’ll take her feeling anything toward me, even if it’s anger.
Taking a step toward me, her smell, herheat,washes over me. For a moment, all I want is to press that elevator button so the doors open, push her inside, and fuck her until she forgets about all of this. “You’re the one who gave up before anything here even started, so why are you acting like you had me? Because youdidn’t. Not even close.”
“You’re acting like you wish you did,” I shoot back. “A new boyfriend just to make me jealous?” Talia violently rolls her eyes. “All I did was make out with someone in the backroom.”
She shakes her head, turning around to press the elevator button. “You just don’t get it, Kay.”
I want to tell her that Idoget it. That I don’t know why I have to be this way. That my first instinct was to push her away when I felt like I could be closer, when I triedso hardto be closer to her. And then when I finally had her there, Ihadto sabotage it.
The doors open and she steps inside. I step toward her, but she holds up a firm hand. “You can take it when I’m done. I’m not letting you in here with me.”
“Talia, be reasonable.”
“You threw reason out the window when you buried yourself between a stranger’s legs.”
The doors closed between us, along with any chance at having her back.
Chapter Sixteen: Talia
“Goddamn butterfingers!” Brian shouts from his spot on the couch next to me while men in overly tight pants sprint across a field on the TV screen. Something’s happened in the game that’s upset him, clearly. Probably a ball drop, or fumble, or whatever it’s called.
I’m trying to read a book Nyla recommended to me while Nico purrs happily in my lap. My thoughts are lost deep within the pages of steamy romance and very graphic sex scenes, which did come as a bit of a surprise to me with Nyla. Between her and Gia, she is by far the most reserved. I would have expected Gia to be reading such filth over Nyla, but I guess Gia gets enough of it in real life.
And I’m only getting Brian.
I eagerly turn the page to find out where the main male love interest is about to stick his you-know-what when Brian shouts again.
“Can you at least try to dial it down? No one’s here to hear you get mad about it but me. And me is annoyed.”
Brian completely ignores me and takes another chug of his beer, eyes glued to the screen. When I attended my parent’s family dinner, which I only went to because they pestered me so heavily about it, I wasn’t expecting to walk into their upscale California bungalow—because the regular mansions have no “soul”, but the regular bungalows were too “poor”—to find Brian and his family already seated at the table.
It was a set-up of sorts, and I knew it. My parents were the ones who first set Brian and I up five years ago. The relationship was a failure, and I was miserable. After the breakup, I got the job at Apollo Sole, and my life turned around as I gradually cut my parents off. But something was broken inside of me when I walked in there seven days ago. Something that had no more resolve to fight off their wishes, or to desire anything that I wanted, because anything that I wanted was doomed to just blow up in my face.
So Brian and I got back together. And now I get to listen to him yell at a TV from my couch.
A commercial comes on, sparing me from the yelling, but now his attention has turned to me, so I’m no longer spared fromhim. He leans in to kiss my neck. I disguise my flinch as an act of shyness, adding in a low hum of fake pleasure for his sake.
“What were you saying, babe?” he asks, pertaining to the fact that hehadheard me speak earlier, but none of the actual words. That had been the problem the first time we dated, too.
