Chapter 6
“Someone drank all the milk,” I inform Mike, who’s sitting at the kitchen table with a massive cup of coffee and a donut, nursing what I’m sure is a brutal hangover.
He groans, dropping his face onto the table.
What did I ever see in this dude?
Seriously.
I’ve spent the last three weeks pining over, obsessing over, this complete mess. It’s Tuesday morning, and I’ve got stats in half an hour, and the milk I bought yesterday, that I wrote my name on, is gone.
I think uh… what’s her name?” He sits back up, looking to the ceiling for the answer. “Jessica! No. Jenna! No.” He waves a hand in the air. “Either way. She needed it for her coffee. I figured you wouldn’t mind.”
I look down at the empty carton, my fingers indenting into the cardboard. “She needed all of it?”
“I don’t know, man. Can’t you see I’ve got a headache here?”
Yes, I can see that, and I don’t care.
I pour the tiny drop of milk Jessica or Jenna or whoever didn’t drink and throw the carton away, being as loud as possible about it.
Slamming the refrigerator and the silverware drawer.
I drop my glass bowl down onto the table hard, letting it clatter against the table loud enough to make Mike wince.
“What the hell?” He grumbles, clutching his forehead through his messy black hair.
It’s not cute.
There’s nothing cute about him.
“You know,” I say, forcing my eyes to stay focused on my mostly dry cereal. “You wouldn’t feel like shit if you didn’t get wasted every night.”
“Maybe,” he agrees around a bite of donut. “But then I would feel like shit every night, so.”
I look up at that admission, something in me hoping there might be more to Mike Pierce. Why he does what he does. A reason for all the drugs and the alcohol and the women.
But then he shrugs. “Sober and my hand vs. Drunk and a hot chick. That’s not that difficult of a decision.”
I nod through the disappointment. No reason then. Just Mike being who everybody says he is. I don’t know why I do this to myself.
“You’re grumpy today,” he says into the silence.
The understatement of the century.
He’s moved to the couch when I get home from work, blanket pulled up to his chin, a horror movie playing on the TV that I actually see him jump at.
I shake my head, going straight upstairs, in no mood to deal with him right now.
My entire shift today was a disaster.
We were out of three ingredients, and no one seemed to care, leading to unsatisfied customers taking out their anger on me. And then, to top it all off, my boss, a lady who’s gotta be at least Nate’s age, won’t stop hitting on me.
This never used to happen before.
I’ve just begun to take off my work clothes, my shirt landing on the floor, when Mike stumbles into my room without knocking.
“Hey, Alex—”
The words die on his tongue as he comes to a complete stop, still clutching the door handle, his eyes roaming over my torso with something I can only call hunger, while time around us feels suspended.
He doesn’t finish his sentence.
He stares at my body while I’m frozen in place, watching him look at me.
Finally, only when his eyes start to trail down further, am I able to snap out of it. “What the— Can’t you knock?!” I challenge, even though I let him look for way too long.
I grab my shirt from the floor and tug it back over my head so fast that I almost forget how to do it for a second, which is even more embarrassing than him seeing so much of my body.
He doesn’t seem worried about that, deflating dramatically when I pull my shirt back down. “Where did that body come from?”
“Shut up, what do you want?”
“Well…” he draws out, going over to sit on my bed, bouncing up and down.
Is this dude for real?
“I came to tell you I’m having a few girls over tonight, and if you want, you can come hang out with us. Remember that girl from the party last weekend? She’s got this roommate, and I told her that I have a roommate and we thought—”
I interrupt his ramble with a scoff.
He pauses, looking up at me from the bed, and I almost feel a little bad when he asks, “What?”
But that goes away quickly when I remember what I’ve been forced to live with for the last two weeks. The parties, the girls every single night, seeing him drunk more than I’ve seen him sober.
He doesn’t have to be like that.
He wasn’t the first week.
So protecting his feelings isn’t at the top of my list right now, especially when he clearly doesn’t care about mine.
“Seems like you can handle that yourself any other time.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I don’t respond, turning toward my dresser, busying myself with looking for something to change into when he’s gone.
“Are you trying to imply that I’m a slut?”
I know it’s wrong. I can see the disappointment on Nate and Iris’s faces if they ever heard me say it. But right now, I’m tired, and Mike is sitting there asking me to hang out with girls with him, and something in me snaps.
“I didn’t say it, you did.”
“Wow. Okay.”
I don’t get the chance to say anything to that, not that I would. But it still doesn’t feel good when I’m sitting alone in my room, the sound of my bedroom door slamming shut still rattling my ears.
I don’t know why I let Ryan drag me out. I hate going to bars. I hate drunk people. And dancing. And beer.
Noise, in general, really.
But what I don’t hate is live music.
This bar has live music every Saturday, and admittedly, that sounds a lot better than whatever Mike has planned for the weekend.
We’ve got a table in front of the stage, and the lights are dimmed, everyone around us lost in conversation. Even Ryan, chatting up a girl at the table beside us.
I keep my eyes on the stage.
That was my dream.
I didn’t talk about it much. Maybe Nate knew. But every time I picked up my guitar, I would imagine being on a stage. Something like this, nothing crazy. I didn’t want to be famous. No way. I’m not even much of a singer.
It wasn’t about that.
I wanted a group of people I loved, standing on stage with me, performing for fifty people, loving every second of it.
I always thought maybe once I got to college, I would find those people, but Jason took away any chance of that.
The lights over the stage come on, and the chatter starts to die out, and it all happens in a blur after that.
First, I realize that I recognize the drummer. The big guy who was sitting in my living room the other week. The lead guitarist, a man I don’t know, but the bassist, I recognize, too. The girl with the pink hair, who sang karaoke in my living room shirtless.
And then Mike.
He comes out last, guitar hanging from his neck, to the sound of applause. He approaches the microphone and introduces the band with the biggest smile, the one from before, when I arrived that first day, when I made him laugh.
“Hey, guys! Thanks for coming out tonight! We’re Chaos Riot!”
Then they’re off, playing a song I recognize in the back of my mind, but I’m unable to place it. I couldn’t if I wanted to. Because Mike is on stage, strumming his guitar, and he’s singing, and he’s good and he’s so beautiful.
And he’s looking right at me.
Those icy blue eyes, looking down at me from the stage.
They move to the next song. It’s a slower, sensual beat, and his voice wraps around the words in a way that has me shifting in my seat. It feels like he’s singing directly at me, and he hasn’t taken his eyes off me once.
“No freakin’ way, man,” Ryan says from beside me, elbowing me to get my attention, but I don’t acknowledge him.
I can’t.
Mike is singing to me, and my cock is throbbing in my pants.
The song ends, and Mike looks away for a second, long enough to make it all come crashing down.
I stand up too fast, bumping into the table and knocking Ryan’s beer over. He protests, but I don’t turn around. I don’t look back.
I have to get out of here.