Bad Romeo (Starcrossed #1)(58)
Author: Leisa Rayven

Tristan stares at him for a moment before relaxing his stance, a look of surprise on his face. “Well … good, then. You have a pretty face. If you treat her right, I won’t have to ruin it.”

I suppress a smile, because in all the time I’ve known him, I’ve only seen Tristan get this alpha-male once before, and that was when a guy he was dating called Gandhi a “grandstanding hypocritical über-pussy.” It took Tris a long time to find his serenity again after he punched the guy in the face.

He gives Holt one last evil eye before clapping his hands together and saying, “Okay, I need to shower. You two behave yourselves while I’m gone.”

Tris departs, leaving Holt and me facing each other awkwardly.

“So … yeah. That’s Tristan,” I say. “He lives here and apparently threatens my ex-boyfriends. Would you like some wine?”

“Fuck, yes,” Holt says, and follows as I head into the kitchen.

I grab a bottle of red and pour two overly generous glasses. I hand one to him and take a large mouthful of mine before leaning against the counter.

“So, Tristan’s kind of protective of you, I take it,” Holt says.

“Oh, you picked up on that?”

“Yeah, a little. It’s not often I’m threatened by a scary-tall super-fit Japanese dude. Can’t say I enjoyed it.”

“He’s only half Japanese. And he’s not usually like that, but I guess seeing the Antichrist in his house pushed him over the edge.”

He laughs and rubs the back of his neck. “Well, I’m just going by Satan these days, but if you want to be all formal about it…”

“Can I call you Lucy?”

“Huh?”

“Short for Lucifer.”

“Oh, sure, but only when we’re alone. I can’t have you calling me that in front of my evil minions. They might laugh and … well … that would just hurt my feelings.”

We head back into the living room and sit on the couch.

“So, you and Tristan. Are you guys”—he looks ill when he says the word—”together?”

I almost laugh. “No.”

“Have you ever been?” He looks at me way too intensely as he waits for my response.

“No. I don’t have the … uh … necessary equipment to satisfy Tristan.”

He looks at me blankly for a few seconds as my words seep into his wine-clouded brain. Then a virtual lightbulb goes on behind his eyes.

“Oh! Well, thank Christ for that. My blood pressure just lowered by about twenty points.”

I laugh and take a sip of wine, and when I look back, he’s staring at me. “I saw pictures of you guys together, you know.”

“When?”

“When I was in Europe. For the first few months after I left, my nighttime ritual was to get shit-faced drunk and google you. There were pictures of you and Tristan together when you were working off-Broadway. When I saw them … I … fuck, Cassie, it gutted me. I thought he was your boyfriend. That you’d moved on, while I couldn’t stop pining for you.”

I get a mental image of him, bottle in hand in front of his computer, seeing me with Tristan and cursing me for not being miserable. But I was miserable, even though the pictures showed me smiling.

“Yeah, well, you always did underestimate my feelings for you,” I say, and turn away from him to fiddle with the stem of my glass. “That was one of our major problems.”

“I know it sounds like a cop-out but … I just couldn’t comprehend how you could love me as much as I loved you. It just didn’t seem possible.”

For a moment, I can’t believe what I’ve just heard. He always had trouble saying the “L” word. It was the one thing that made what we had too real for him.

When I glance over, he looks like an arachnophobe who just trumped a roomful of spiders.

“Impressed?” he asks. “Look at me go with the ‘L’ word. Didn’t even stutter.”

“It’s like a miracle, only less likely.”

Now it’s his turn to gaze at his wine. “It’s only taken three years for me to realize that not saying it didn’t help me deny my feelings. Whether or not I loved you wasn’t dependent upon a word. It was just a fact. Plain and simple. You’d be surprised how often I say it these days.”

I go back to my wine, because his face is so full of emotion that I just can’t look at it.

“Music?” I say, and head over to my iPod.

I spend a few moments looking mindlessly through my playlists, before he says, “Need help? Because if you pull out any country music, I’ll be forced to mock you.”

“You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”

“What, that you once spent real folding money on a Dixie Chicks album? Nope. Never living that down.”

“Hey, there were some good songs on that album.”

“Cassie, there was fucking yodeling on that album. I’m pretty sure that album killed the stereo in my old car.”

I laugh. “You used to blare AC/DC out of that car every day. Those speakers were completely shredded. You can’t possibly blame two minutes of yodeling.”

He walks over and takes the iPod from me. “That two minutes scarred my eardrums for life. I can only speculate about what it did to my poor stereo. Now, step aside, woman. Allow me to find the perfect music for us.”

I shake my head and sit down. I’m once again struck by how surreal it is to have him in my apartment. Six months ago, it would have been inconceivable. Now he’s trying so hard to show me that he’s matured and grown. If only I had. Even now, I can feel resentment bubbling inside of me, waiting for him to make one wrong move so it can explode.

“Oh, wow,” he says with a nervous glance over his shoulder. “Don’t hate me for putting this on, but … God … this album…”

The opening strains of Radiohead’s Pablo Honey filter though the speakers, and I immediately tense.

I take another mouthful of wine.

“I can change it if you want,” he says. “I just … I haven’t heard it in a while.”

Yeah, me neither.

“It’s fine,” I say, before drinking again. The alcohol makes it easy to lie. This album was the soundtrack of so many memories, and although they’re pleasant ones, they’re also the parts of him I miss the most.

He joins me on the couch, far enough away to make it look like he’s respecting my personal space but close enough to make my wine-addled brain crave him closer. I lean my head back and let the music distract me.