Chapter 15
TRISTAN
“Arms around my neck.”
“I can walk,” Katie protests.
I brace an arm on the edge of the car door. “You cannot walk. You might be learning to dance, but heels on gravel are a bad idea and have always been a bad idea, since the first time you fell and skinned your knee.”
“So undignified,” she grumbles.
I grin, warmth spreading through me. Katie might be out dancing with guys with boring names, but I’m still the one who carries her home.
“You’re still dignified, Bailey, don’t worry. You’ll always be dignified to me.” She’s not dignified right now, actually. She’s loose. She came back from her dance with the guy all smiles and wanted another drink, and now she’s a little smudged around the edges in a way I never see her.
Tipsy.
And I’m glad it’s with me. I’m glad she didn’t go home with what’s his name, and I have no right to be glad. None. Zero.
Not when he made her feel good. Not when it’s clear that dating and dancing and losing control are what she needs.
She’s twenty-six, for fuck’s sake. She should be in his car with her dress hiked up around her thighs like it is now, and she should be with someone who wants to pull over and lick her thigh because he can’t go one more stoplight without touching her.
“Come on.” I bend. “Remember when you chipped a tooth?”
Her hand lands on my right shoulder. “A gentleman would stop reminding me.”
“Not a gentleman.”
“It’s true.” She clambers onto my back. “Good thing, I guess. Since I’m just using you for your body.”
A laugh billows out of me. God, if only she knew. “I knew it,” I say mournfully.
“There, there.” She pats my shoulder. “It’s a pretty nice body.”
I stand with my hands around her ankles. “A compliment? From you? You must be drunk.”
Her chin is on my shoulder, her warm, slight weight a comfort against my back. “Don’t tell my boss,” she whispers.
I laugh again, feeling lighter than air, as I click the button that makes the car doors descend and lock. “I hear he’s a real jerk.”
“No. He’s amazing.”
My heart thuds at her words. “Tell me more,” I say huskily. This is my favorite thing.
The only time I don’t feel selfish.
“Fishing,” she chides, but then she says, “Generous.” My heart thuds again. “Kind. A tad too tall.”
Just right is what she means. Katie can’t help but tease me.
She sighs. “Strong arms. Good at carrying drunk bodyguards home.”
“Always.”
She presses her cheek between my shoulder blades. “Tristan,” she whispers. “I can feel your heartbeat.”
Hopefully she doesn’t read what it’s telling her. That I’m affected by her closeness. That I was affected on the dance floor too. That I don’t know where to put these unwelcome feelings.
I adjust my grip on her slender ankles as we round the side of the main house and the security center comes into view.
“Thank you, heart,” she whispers. “For taking my best friend through each day.”
“I take it back. You’re not drunk. You’re wasted.”
She giggles and toys with the ends of my hair. “Drunk enough to give him my number.”
All the warmth I was feeling rushes out of me. “Good,” I tell her. “That’s good.”
“Are you proud of me?” She yawns.
“So proud.” I mount the steps to her apartment. I’ve carried her up here a hundred times, and normally, I let her down outside of her door and I don’t go inside. But tonight, I enter the code and duck through the door with her on my back, then set her down in the kitchen.
Her apartment is small. I remember the first time I saw it.
My first reaction was to force her to move.
She scowled at me and told me I’d have to carry her out of the apartment first. And thus, a true friendship was born.
I tease her, she threatens me with bodily harm.
She snort-laughs at my jokes and bullies me into running with her in the mornings, and we exchange alarmed glances during family meetings when Whit wants to do something stupid.
Whenever I look for her, she’s already looking at me.
Whit always had Sienna. Aiden had Dad, and to a lesser extent, me, but I’ve never had anyone who was mine and mine alone.
And then Katie came along. She smiles her best smiles for me and laughs her biggest laughs, and against all odds, she seems to like me better than anyone else.
I foist things on her, like raises and clothes and a safer car, and she secretly enjoys them, and I secretly watch. It works for us.
Which is why I really can’t mess this up.
“We’re not being dumb, right?” The words pop out.
Katie turns from where she’s filling water glasses. “Dumb?” She tips her head before she passes me a glass.
I watch her drink, her pouty pink lips closing on the glass, her chocolate eyes glinting under heavy lids.
I shove a hand through my hair. “You know, practicing and stuff. I’m your friend—I don’t want—fuck.” I take a long gulp of cold water to stop the flow of nonsense. “This is not coming out well.”
“Oh.” Her brows tug together. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, it doesn’t, um, change anything. But if you’re uncomfortable—”
“No. No, I’m not,” I rush to say. “And you’re not.”
“No.” She shakes her head and takes another sip of water. “Tonight was…nice.”
She leans back against the counter.
“Right. It was—” Dangerous. “Nice. Yeah.”
We sip, and I cast around for something to say, to make this not weird, because it won’t be the last time we practice, and I sure as hell can’t have her knowing that my dick got hard for her.
“What’s that?” I spy a magazine on her counter. “Did you steal that from me?”
“Oh.” She bites her lip. “I’m sorry. I was going to bring it back.”
I wander over to the quarterly magazine my college puts out. On it, three students walk in front of the old history building. It’s a picture-perfect moment, the stuff of movies.
“Why’d you take it?” I pick it up and riffle through the pages.
“No reason.” She lifts one shoulder.
“No reason,” I repeat. My gaze flicks to hers.
She’s giving nothing away. Then I see a picture on the fridge.
It’s hidden behind a list of grocery items, written in her neat hand, even though I told her years ago to eat all her meals from catering.
Under that list, the picture teases me. The edges are jagged, like it was clipped from something, and the colors are ones I recognize, the edge of the text in a font I know well.
I have ball caps and sweatshirts and emails begging me for money with that font.
The picture has been clipped and then hidden, and I bet I know exactly what’s on it.
I want to break something. I close the magazine carefully, then align it with the edge of the table. Katie’s eyes are wary and shadowed.
I think about the conviction in her voice when Katie talks about her dreams. I think about the TV shows she watches and the way she always hugs her knees to her chest during the family reunions and her most-watched episodes about girls going off to college and the way she leans forward like she wants to soak up every morsel of their experience.
The questions she asks me about school and how every time I mention an interesting podcast or documentary, she goes home and listens to it, and how she always takes my book recommendations and carefully stacks those books on her table and makes little notes in the margins that she apologizes for.
Her face gets all pink like she’s ashamed of how wrapped up she got while reading.
Like she could ever have anything to be embarrassed about. Not with me. Never with me.
She looks like she’s about to kick me out.
“You want a grilled cheese?” I ask quickly.
“Chef Tristan.” She gives me a grateful smile. “Is it still the only thing you can cook?”
“You know it is.” I smile back at her. “And I was taught by the best.”
“A man should be able to make a grilled cheese,” she says sagely, then giggles.
“You want to put on a movie?”
“Absolutely.”
She settles on the couch in the small living space. “Sleepless in Seattle?”
“We watched that last month.”
“Princess Diaries?”
“Always good. But no.”
“I have a new one. French. Marion Cotillard and Guillaume Canet. Apparently it’s a classic.”
“Mais oui.” I turn the stove on.
“Show-off. I need subtitles for that, so don’t distract me.”
“Would I ever?” I press a hand over my heart.
“You better hope you find someone who only eats grilled cheeses and likes men who distract them.”
Her words are light, but a pit yawns in my stomach. I forgot about the marriage. For one night.
I nod and make the sandwiches while the movie starts. When I set them down on the coffee table and settle next to her, she sighs happily and drags the plate closer.
Her first bite makes her moan.
“That good?”
“Better than sex.”
I snort. “You’re having the wrong kind of sex.”
She gives me a horrifying, cheese-filled smile. “Not for long.”
I groan and bite into my own sandwich.
“Hey, Tristan?”
I look at her, then swallow, barely tasting my food. “Yeah?”
Her eyes are sincere and luminous. “Thank you for tonight.”
“Of course,” I say hoarsely.
She settles back against the couch and tucks her knees under her. “I’ll miss this.”
“This again.” I frown. “I’m not going anywhere and neither are you.”
She shrugs, but her eyes are sad. My chest pinches. It feels like she’s slipping away from me, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.