True (True Believers #1)(36)
Author: Erin McCarthy

“True.” Disappointed, I stepped back.

Tyler gave me a quick kiss. “Tomorrow we need to go get you a phone. I don’t like not being able to get in touch with you.”

That should have been a statement that made me feel good, important to him. But for some reason I was feeling that he had put me in the same category as his brothers—someone he needed to take care of. Not someone he thought was hot.

“It will probably work when it dries out.”

“If it doesn’t, text me on Jessica’s phone.”

My hot roommate’s phone. Feeling a self-esteem crisis coming on, I gave him a smile. “Okay. Thanks, again. Talk to you tomorrow.”

Then I strode toward the door, wanting him to stop me. Wanting him to grab me and passionately kiss me or insist we spend the night together or say something completely and utterly romantic that girls dreamed of and no guy ever said.

He didn’t, of course.

And I went up to my room to pry some ice out of our mini-fridge for Kylie’s lip and tried not to ruin the only relationship I’d ever had by being needy.

It was a damn good thing my phone was dead or I was fairly certain I would have.

Chapter Twelve

Kylie and Nathan were snuggled up in Nathan’s room, and Tyler was out on a beer run when Grant showed up. I went to answer the knock on the door, assuming it would be Tyler. Someone must have accidentally turned the button on the doorknob and locked it, because the door to the apartment was almost never locked. But when I opened it, Grant was standing there, slouched, shaggy hair down over his eyes, hands deep in his front pockets.

My smile disappeared and a pit of tension formed in my stomach. “Oh. Hi.”

“Hey.” Grant moved forward to step into the apartment and for a second I forgot to shift out of the way, stunned to see him standing there so casual, a sheepish smile on his face.

When I blocked his entry by not moving, his eyebrows went up as he turned sideways, his body closer to mine than I would have liked. “Can I come in?”

That pulled me out of my paralysis. Whereas before I didn’t move, now I did too quickly, stumbling over my feet as I jerked backward out of his way. “Sure.” It wasn’t my apartment. I had no right to tell him he couldn’t come in, and I guessed that Nathan had invited him over to watch the football game along with everyone else. I couldn’t exactly ask Nathan though as he and Kylie were having some kind of reunion sex in his room. Kylie’s split lip had prompted Nathan to call her and beg to see her, and she had forced me along with her as moral support.

Not that I had minded, because I knew Tyler would be there.

But not Grant. I hadn’t expected that. Ignoring him, I shut the door and went back to the small kitchen, where I had been cutting up cheese for crackers and heating pizza rolls for the game-viewing.

Unfortunately, he followed me into the kitchen. “Where is everyone?”

“Tyler is at the store. Kylie and Nathan are in his room.”

Grant made a face. “No Jessica?”

“No.” I remembered then what he had said to me that night about passing that kiss on to Jessica. I busied myself carefully spacing out pizza rolls on a cookie sheet I had found in the drawer under the stove.

“Hey, listen, um, about that night . . .”

Great. “We don’t have to talk about this,” I told him. In fact, I’d rather do anything but talk about it.

“I just want to say sorry. I was totally f**ked up, and I mean, I thought you wanted to . . . I thought you were kissing me back.”

He sounded so pained and uncomfortable with the whole conversation that I momentarily felt sympathy for him. I had kissed him back. There was no arguing with that. When I glanced over at him, he looked even thinner to me now than he ever had. I wasn’t sure if he had lost weight in the weeks since that night or if it was just my perception now that I was used to Tyler. “I was,” I told him honestly. “I just didn’t want to take it any further. I’m sorry I wasn’t clear about that up front. But I think I made it clear later.”

Chewing his fingernail, he nodded before giving up a deep rattling cough. His chest heaved painfully. When he could finally speak, he said, “Then I’m sorry. But what I don’t get is why you didn’t just tell me you had the hots for Tyler. We could have worked together.”

“What do you mean?” I put the tray inside the oven and went to pull out my phone—which was fortunately now working—to set an alarm for fifteen minutes. I didn’t bother to tell Grant that I hadn’t had the hots for Tyler before that night. I didn’t even have them right after that night. It was a week or so later before I really started to appreciate how attractive and charming Tyler was.

“The thing is, people like you and me, we’re not going to score with Jessica and Tyler all on our own. It’s just reality.”

I stared at him, not at all enjoying the sound of that.

“I mean, look at what had to happen for Tyler to notice you. He had to come in and ‘rescue’ you.” Grant made air quotes with his fingers. I had never noticed how watery his eyes were until now, how bruised the skin was under them. “You make him feel manly. He wants to take care of you, like a puppy somebody ditched by the side of the road.”

Did he have any clue how insulting he was being? How absolutely and completely rude that was to say to me?

Yet part of me knew that he was right. So maybe Tyler didn’t equate me with a puppy. But it was my naïveté that had first caught his attention, and the fact that I had needed a protector. It had been brought to my attention the night before at the club, too. I didn’t want to hear Grant saying it out loud. It made me feel like I’d won Tyler’s affection by default, by being weak.

“So how does any of that help you? Jessica doesn’t fall in for charity cases.”

“No, but I bet you anything she likes it rough. If you and I had planned this, you could have told Jessica where Tyler could overhear it that we had consensual sex, but it was rougher than you liked. That there was hairpulling and slapping. Jessica would have been turned on, and Tyler would have felt instantly protective.”

I stared at him, appalled. “You’ve given this a lot of thought, haven’t you?” I didn’t want to give it any thought. The idea of saying Grant had pulled my hair was too close to the truth of what had happened and I was disgusted.

“Yes. We wouldn’t have even had to have sex. We could have just said we did.”