Chapter 22 – Lena #2
"No. It's not too much. Every time I see you around campus, you're scarfing down a banana or a yogurt. That's hardly breakfast."
I stopped mid-chew. "What do you mean you saw me eating yogurt and bananas?"
He shrugged and reached for the orange juice like I'd asked about the weather. "I would see you in the mornings. You have a class in the econ building. I was usually coming back from practice around then. I saw you every day."
My fork froze halfway to my mouth. "So, what? You were watching me?"
He pushed the eggs toward me again, his jaw tightening once before he smoothed it. "No. But you're kind of hard to miss. I would know that ass anywhere." The corner of his mouth tugged up, but his eyes didn't match the smile. "And I did think about you from time to time. Wondered if you were okay."
I stared at my plate because if I looked at him I was going to cry into my scrambled eggs and ruin the mascara I'd reapplied ten minutes ago, and that felt like a waste of really good mascara. "Why didn't you ever say anything?"
When I finally looked up, his throat worked around a swallow and his fingers had tightened on his juice glass until his knuckles paled under the tape.
The smirk was gone — just this big, uncertain guy gripping a glass of orange juice too hard — and seeing Trace stripped of the cockiness did something to me that four orgasms hadn't managed.
"Remember how up until a few weeks ago you hated me still? Just because you hated me didn't mean I hated you."
He never hated me. I'd spent all that time avoiding him and he'd spent it watching me eat sad yogurt for breakfast and saying nothing.
"This is going to take some getting used to."
"What? Not hating me, or being my girlfriend?"
A grin hijacked my face before I could stop it. "Is that what I am now? Your girlfriend?"
His dimple appeared — the real one, left side, the one he couldn't fake — and he laced his fingers through mine across the table. "In case you missed it last night, and this morning, that was me auditioning for the role of boyfriend. How'd I do?"
Better than I ever dreamed. And I'd dreamed about it more than I'd ever admit out loud.
"You do make a very good boyfriend."
"Good." He squeezed my hand and picked up his fork. "Now eat up so we can see your mother."
The treatment facility was a low brick building that tried hard not to look clinical and mostly failed. As we pulled in, I put my hand on Trace's thigh. "In case I haven't said it — thank you for this. We wouldn't have gotten in with Dr. Okafor without you."
His brows pulled together. "Of course. I just wish I hadn't been such a selfish prick and had been paying closer attention. Would have done it without the fake girlfriend thing."
The fake girlfriend thing that became so much more.
Mom was sitting up in bed, crossword on her knee, reading glasses on. Thinner than last time — cheekbones sharper, hospital gown loose — but her eyes were bright and alert when she looked up. That was new. That was the Dr. Okafor difference.
She peeked around me toward the door. "Come on in, Trace Coulter."
He ducked through the doorway — all six-four of him — rubbing the back of his neck like he was fifteen and nervous about meeting someone's mom. "Hi, Mrs. Hartwell. It's good to see you. I wish it was under different circumstances."
My mother waved a hand, IV line swaying. "You always were so polite. Unlike your brother." Trace and I both winced, but Mom just shrugged. "Nonsense. Trace was always my favorite. I always said you should have gone out with him instead."
I rolled my eyes. "Well, he never asked."
He laughed and pulled me into his side. "Better late than never."
Mom's whole face changed — a real smile, the kind that made her look like the woman who used to dance in the kitchen — and she took both our hands, hers cool and thin, the IV bruise fading to yellow.
"It makes me happy to see the two of you together.
Trace, thank you for making my baby smile again.
Her last boyfriend was useless. All he did was make her cry. "
"Well, I will do my best not to do that."
We stayed for thirty minutes, Trace pulling a chair close, elbows on his knees, actually listening when she talked about her treatment. At one point Mom caught my eye over his head and mouthed Keep this one and I had to stare at the fluorescent light until the sting passed.
Outside my dorm, the October air bit through my jacket.
Trace parked and came around to open my door, and the second I stepped out he pulled me into his arms and leaned back against the Range Rover with his chin on top of my head.
I pressed my face into his chest — hotel soap and coffee and underneath it, just him.
"It's funny," he said into my hair. "I can't stop touching you now."
I don't want him to stop, ever.
"You won't hear me complaining."
"So, there's a party Friday night at the house." His thumb traced my jaw. "You feel up to it? Or we can just hang at yours."
My boyfriend. I could get used to that.
"Maybe those plans will have to wait. Or who knows? My asshole brother might be fucking other people by then."
Every muscle in Trace's body locked and his arms dropped. He set me to the side, gently but firmly, and stepped forward to put himself between me and the voice. "Trev. What are you doing here?"
Oh no.
Everything good I'd felt since last night just evaporated.
Trevor stood at the base of the dorm steps with his arms crossed and his jaw tight enough to crack teeth — leather jacket, dark jeans, Rolex catching the last afternoon light.
Same height as Trace but broader through the chest, features just different enough to feel off, like someone had photocopied Trace and the quality degraded with each pass.
"Imagine my surprise," he said, one boot on the bottom step, "when I called Aaron about the charity event and he said no worries — you and your girlfriend already handled it.
" He let the word sit. "Funny. Last I checked, my little brother doesn't have a girlfriend.
He's just as much of a pussy hound as I am. "
The word sounded different coming from Trevor, cheaper and meaner, like something he'd practiced.
"Trev, enough." Trace planted his feet and squared his shoulders, the same flat calm from right before he'd put Matt into the library shelves. "Let me get Lena inside and we'll talk."
I looked between them, the cold settling behind my ribs. "Trace? I thought you said you'd handled Trevor."
Trevor's gaze locked onto me, and the smile that spread across his face was the cruelest thing I'd ever seen on a face I used to kiss goodnight.
"You, whore, don't get to talk."
It landed like a fist to the sternum and my shoulders curled in, stomach dropping, skin going cold.
I'd been made this small before — Matt in the library stacks, his hand on my wrist, telling me I was nothing — but hearing it from Trevor, someone I'd dated for a year, someone I'd actually cared about, hit different.
For a second I was eighteen again, standing in his dorm room, wondering what I'd done wrong.
Trace closed the distance in two strides, his voice dropping low enough to scrape the ground. "Call her that again."
"What the fuck else do you call a bitch that fucks two—"
"She never fucked you, Trevor."
The silence that followed was louder than anything Trevor had said. His mouth snapped shut and his chin jerked back half an inch before his nostrils flared and his hands curled into fists, a trapped, ugly look moving behind his eyes.
"Is that what she told you?" His jaw was working, a muscle ticking hard beneath the skin.
"She didn't have to." Trace didn't blink, didn't shift, didn't give him an inch.
He knew. I didn't know how — locker room talk, maybe, or whatever his brother's friends said when they thought no one was listening — but the way Trace stood there watching Trevor's whole narrative fall apart, it looked like something he'd been sitting on for a long time.
Trevor swung first, a wild right hook that Trace sidestepped before driving his fist into Trevor's face hard enough that the crack echoed off the brick, and Trevor stumbled back and caught the railing.
He came back harder and his second punch exploded across Trace's cheekbone, blood gushing at his lip.
Then Trevor rushed him and they slammed into the Range Rover, metal denting under their combined weight, before they went down on the concrete — grappling, throwing short vicious punches at close range, blood on the steps, on Trace's mouth, on Trevor's jaw, while students slowed down and pulled out their phones because of course they did.
"Stop!" My voice cracked raw across the concrete. "Stop it!"
They didn't hear a thing. Fists landed. Blood spattered.
And then that quiet voice in the back of my head cut through — the one I'd been drowning out since the moment Trevor appeared.
He told you he'd handle it. That Trevor would deal with it.
He never handled anything.
That cut deeper than anything Trevor said. Trace had sworn to me this was handled, had looked me in the eye and promised Trevor would deal with it, and I'd believed him because I was already falling and wanted any excuse to keep falling.
But he hadn't done a thing. And Trace knew what that had done to me. He knew, and he let me walk into this anyway.
Not that I gave two fucks what Trevor thought. But I had trusted Trace, and he'd let me stand here with no warning, no preparation, nothing.
This was between them. It had always been between them.
I wasn't going to stand here and bleed for both of them.
I turned and walked up the dorm steps and pulled the door open. Behind me, a grunt, a crack, someone hitting concrete.
I didn't look back.
I made it to the elevator before my hands started shaking, made it to my floor before my vision blurred, and made it inside my room where I closed the door and locked it and slid down to the floor with my back against it, jacket still on, bag still over my shoulder.
The hickey on my collarbone throbbed under my shirt.
You let him lie. And worse — you wanted him to.