She let out a string of swear words that would have made Rule and the boys proud and shoved up into a sitting position so that she was hugging her knees. “It shouldn’t matter. He was a bastard and cheated on me the entire time we were together. He owned the shop I worked at in Brooklyn. I came back late one day because I forgot something, and walked in on him putting it to one of his clients in the back room. That wasn’t even the worst part. I thought we were family, that the shop was home, but everyone knew and no one ever said a thing. I looked like a fool.”
She ran her hands through her short hair and growled like an angry puppy. “He was the first guy I ever really loved, ya know? I was so sure that I was over it, but then I saw that stupid announcement and I felt like I was reliving it all over again. If Phil hadn’t pulled me out of the city when he did, I don’t know what I would have done. It just sucks that he’s moved on to some other unsuspecting girl, and I go day after day alone.”
I went to the kitchen to grab her a bottle of water and hand her a paper towel to wipe off her face.
“It’s not like you don’t have every opportunity to date and have a boyfriend. I’ve been out with you. You get hit on all the time.”
She rubbed her multitoned eyes and sighed. “I get hit on by the same kind of guy over and over again; tatted up, restless, and only looking for a good time. I work with guys like them, and some of my best friends are guys like that, Ayd. I know how they operate. I’ve had my heart stomped on, so even though I could probably hang out with one of them for a minute, in the long run I would still end up heartbroken and alone.”
“So date someone different.”
She looked at me from under spiky eyelashes and a hint of her old attitude started to surface.
“Says the girl who is dating a guy who looks like he should be smoking a pipe and reading Chaucer.”
Now it was my turn to sigh and flop on the couch. I crossed my arms over my stomach and looked at her out of the corner of my eye.
“I broke it off with him today.”
She lifted a pale eyebrow, the one with the pink stud in it at me. “Really? I thought you were planning a perfectly boring future of going to the cinema and breeding supergeniuses with tedious bouts of vanilla sex.”
“Yeah, well, I would actually have to want to have sex with him in order to breed anything and it just isn’t happening—vanilla or otherwise. I just couldn’t string him along anymore.”
She popped me on the shoulder with her tiny fist and gave me a huge grin. “Good. Now you can stop pretending that you don’t want to get all kinds of naked and horizontal with Jet.”
I snapped my head around and stared at her with my mouth hanging open. “You’re the second person today who has told me I should just go ahead and sleep with him.”
She shrugged and tossed the blanket to the floor. “Shaw and I talk about it all the time. Jet is sexy, like it-hurts-to-look-at-him sexy, so we totally get it. What we don’t get is why you so obviously struggle to keep him at arm’s length. I see you stare at him day in and day out, and when he’s onstage, Ayd, you should see the way you look at him.”
I fidgeted nervously, again unaware that I was being so transparent about what he did to me and the struggle I had with myself to keep my hands off.
“Everyone watches him like that when he’s onstage. He’s amazing and talented.”
She got to her feet and stretched her arms above her head. She patted me on top of my head with the tattooed arm on her way out of the room, calling over her shoulder, “Yeah, that’s true, but you’re the only one he ever looks into the crowd for. You’re the only one he makes sure is watching if he knows you’re there.”
That made my breath catch in my throat and my pulse slip and slide. I wasn’t oblivious to the fact that Jet and I shared a pretty potent amount of attraction, but I was also smart enough to know that after turning me down last winter, he hadn’t had an empty bed or a serious relationship since.
A relationship needed more than fire and flames to make it work. Plus, he didn’t know the real me, and the me he did know, he had deemed too clean to mess up. Having someone else tell me that he might be looking at me, realizing all the forbidden things I wanted to do to him and seeing through the perfect image I tried to project, really made me nervous. I struggled around him now, and if he had an inkling as to what I really wanted, I didn’t know that I would be able to keep my hands to myself and out of his pants any longer .
Grumbling to myself I picked my stuff up off the floor and wandered back to my room. I scowled at his closed door and settled in to do some homework and brood. I didn’t want to go to dinner with Adam, and now with Cora’s startling revelation, I didn’t really want to go to the show afterward, either. Maybe when I packed up and left Kentucky, I should have looked into becoming a nun. Right now, that seemed like it would be a whole lot easier to handle.
With my dark hair and odd-colored eyes I looked good in red and since it was Valentine’s Day, I thought that my dress with its flared skirt and off-the-shoulder boatneck in lipstick red was a perfect choice. My hair was too short to do much with so I curled it around the front of my face, and pinned the long bangs back with a bobby pin that had a big rhinestone heart on it. I had been to enough of Jet’s shows to know that heels weren’t exactly the best choice in footwear, but I didn’t have anything else that would fit with the dress, so I settled on a pair of black patent leather Mary Janes.
When I looked in the mirror I had to acknowledge that I looked way too good to simply be having dinner with my ex-sorta-boyfriend, and that I was dressing for someone else entirely. And that wasn’t smart, but I didn’t care or change my outfit.
Adam arrived right on time in his very sensible Subaru, and drove us downtown. The conversation in the car was stiff and strained, even though he told me I looked lovely and was being perfectly polite. We devolved into talking about school and chemistry. By the time we got seated at the restaurant, it was all I could do not to check my phone every five minutes to see the time. I was antsy and still a little concerned about his comment that he felt like I was two different people. That was something I battled with on a regular basis and had thought I’d figured out how to keep the old me totally locked down tight.
I would be the first to admit that I was probably the worst Valentine’s date in the history of the holiday. When he ordered a bottle of wine to have with dinner, I wanted to groan because that just seemed too datelike, but I owed it to him to at least try to be pleasant. I let him pour me a glass and forced a smile.