38. Rafe
38
RAFE
“Well, they’re definitely fucking,” Jude said, returning to the kitchen.
I clenched my jaw and tried to focus on the words in the email on my laptop. “Don’t care.”
It was a lie. I knew it and Jude knew it, but I had to say it. I was like an actor in a well-rehearsed play. I knew my lines so well I couldn’t have ad-libbed if I’d tried.
“You sure about that?” Jude asked, pulling out a pan and setting it on the stove. He walked to the fridge and took out the eggs, then pulled a bowl down from one of the cabinets.
“Yes I’m fucking sure.” I didn’t know what was more annoying, the fact that Nolan had fucked Lilah while Jude and I were working or the fact that Jude knew it had gotten under my skin.
“He’s closer to her,” Jude said, cracking eggs into the bowl. “Because of the medical stuff.”
“What part don’t you understand about I don’t care ?” The “medical stuff” Lilah and Nolan had in common was more than just Lilah’s heart thing, although Lilah didn’t know that yet.
“It’s okay to want her,” Jude said. He poured a little cold water in the bowl — a trick Jude swore made scrambled eggs softer — and used a fork to mix them together.
“I don’t.”
Even I knew I was lying.
“You don’t what?” Nolan said, walking into the kitchen. His hair was damp, his face arranged into the smuggest fucking smirk I’d ever seen on the fucker’s face.
“He doesn’t care that you fucked Lilah,” Jude said, cutting off a chunk of butter and dropping it into the frying pan.
Nolan barked out a laugh. “Bullshit.”
“It’s a bad decision,” I said, because it was a lot easier to chalk up the fact that Nolan had fucked Lilah — something I’d dreamed about since that night at Brandon Miller’s party — as a bad decision than as something that made me want to punch him in the face.
None of it made sense. Nolan, Jude, and I had shared women before — it was the twenty-first fucking century, for fuck’s sake — but it had always been casual, a way to blow off steam.
I had way too much history with Lilah for the word “casual" to come into play, but one thing was for damn sure: in my many fantasies about her, I was either fucking her alone or we were all fucking her together.
In no world was Nolan the one to get there first.
“Why is it a bad decision?” Nolan asked.
“Can you butter those?” Jude asked him when four English muffins popped out of the toaster.
“Because it is,” I said. “She’s not part of our lives.”
“She wasn’t part of our lives,” Jude pointed out. “She’s been living here for over a month.”
“The more tangled up you get in her, the harder it’s going to be when it’s time for her to go home,” I said.
Nolan turned to look at me. “Are you talking about me or yourself?”
I glared at him. “Don’t try to shrink me.”
“I’m not,” Nolan said. “It’s an honest question, because it seems like you have a lot of feelings about this, about Lilah.”
Jude used a spatula to place scrambled eggs on the buttered English muffins, then topped them with pepper jack cheese while four slices of ham sizzled in the skillet.
“I don’t.” Denial was a habit of mine when it came to Lilah. “I just don’t want us to lose focus. And fucking Lilah seems like a good fucking way to lose focus.”
I wasn’t even surprised when Lilah walked into the kitchen while my words were still hanging in the air. The woman was like a fucking cat slinking around the house.
“Any details Nolan left out?” Lilah asked, heading for the coffee pot. “Want to know how many times I came? How many times we fucked?”
Her words were full of bravado but I knew from the flush on her perfect fucking face that she was embarrassed.
She put a cup under the machine and pressed brew, then turned to face us, arms folded over her chest, green eyes flashing. “Or maybe you just want to know what it was like for Nolan to take my virginity, to literally fuck me over after doing it figuratively in high school.”
All the air seemed to be sucked out of the room. It was like that moment when someone gave away a secret they forgot they weren’t supposed to tell, like letting slip that the casual dinner you had planned for a friend was actually a massive surprise party.
The blood was pounding in my veins, roaring in my ears.
Lilah had been a fucking virgin. And Nolan had gotten there first.
It shouldn’t matter. It didn’t.
I repeated it in my head like a mantra: it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter .
But the words did less than nothing to dampen the jealousy raging in my body, fighting to escape like a caged animal.
Nolan walked over to Lilah and kissed her forehead. He pulled her coffee out from under the machine and handed it to her. “No one said a word about your virginity, sweetheart.”
She took the coffee and looked up at him. “No one… what?”
“No one said anything about the fact that you were a virgin. Except you, just now.”
She chewed her lower lip and the pink in her cheeks turned to full-on scarlet. “Fuck.”