30. Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Three
JULIAN
After devouring Maisie’s breakfast, we lingered around the dining table, relaxed, the air humming with a quiet sense of belonging.
It’s one of those small, seemingly insignificant moments that somehow manages to etch itself into my bones—a hint of something I’ve always yearned for, but thought was out of reach.
“So, how’s the apartment hunt going?” Carter asks, feigning mere curiosity while really wanting to know how much longer Andrea plans to live here.
I still haven’t given her Francesca’s phone number.
In a completely selfish way, I like having her here, maybe even love it—not that I’ll say this out loud.
Andrea has her own life to live, and if she wants to move, I won’t stand in her way.
But a part of me can’t help but hope her search has been nothing but dead ends.
“Terrible,” Andrea huffs, taking a sip of her coffee.
He lifts a single brow. “It can’t be that bad. How many places have you looked at?”
Maisie, reclining at the head of the table with her legs kicked up, jumps in. “Too many. It’s truly heinous out there. I’ll stick with my hotel rooms.”
A flicker of irritation crosses his features as he looks at the bare feet propped on the table. “Remove your dogs from my face. ”
She rolls her eyes. “My feet aren’t in your face; they’re in front of it.”
“If I can smell them, they’re too close to it,” he says, grabbing her ankles and setting her feet firmly on the floor.
“My feet don’t smell.” Laughing in amusement, she lifts them into his lap instead. “Better?”
He glares down at her pink-polished toes as if they’ve offended him, though I know better. It’s becoming pretty clear why he hadn’t introduced me to Andrea sooner—because with her came Maisie, who knows just how to push his buttons.
Andrea leans toward me, lowering her voice. “They’re always like this.” She glances back at the pair who are now bickering over personal space. “Did I ever tell you that I met Maisie through Carter?”
I shake my head, intrigued. “He met her first?”
She nods with a solemn look on her face. Before she can say anything else, Carter cuts in with a dry “Unfortunately.”
Her eyes narrow as she focuses on them. “But they refuse to tell me how they met.”
“That seems unfair,” I say.
“Right!”
Grinning mischievously, Maisie sings, “He had the biggest crush on me.”
Carter scoffs, but his cheeks tint. “Did not.”
“Whatever helps you sleep at night, or you know. . .” She wags her eyebrows suggestively before coughing into her arm as she mutters, “Grow a Midnight Rainbow.”
Panicked and betrayed eyes land on me. “You didn’t.”
To hide my smile, I press my mouth against the back of Andrea’s hand, which somehow found its way into mine .
“Oh, he did,” Maisie states, looking rather pleased with herself. “And I’m honored.”
Andrea grimaces. “Ew.”
“I told you that in confidence,” Carter tells me, and I feel only slightly guilty. He did tell me in confidence, but he also gave me a new roommate without asking and has done a dozen other things I could have retaliated for.
“In confidence?” Maisie questions with a quirky brow. “Really?”
“ Yes ,” he hisses, turning to her with a vengeful look when Andrea snorts. “Remember the time your t-shirt signed by Johnny Depp went missing?” he asks and then answers the question right away, “Andrea washed it and she made me hide the evidence.”
Maisie gasps as Andrea’s eyes widen. Pointing an accusing finger at Carter, she pleas with her friend. “Don’t listen to him. He’s trying to shift our focus from the fact that you’re his fluffer. Let’s focus on that .”
She gives her best friend a skeptical look. “Is that really what happened to it?”
“Mhm,” Carter hums in confirmation.
Andrea’s eyes narrow. “Carter sleeps with a night light.”
I chuckle. “Do you really?”
Carter scoffs, not even noticing how his hand is resting on Maisie’s shin. “Oh, don’t even get me started on you.”
“You already have by going for Andrea,” I state smoothly, and she beams at me, looking so fucking adorable that I could kiss her.
“Drea’s the one who told your mother that you had a sex addiction, not me!” Maisie blurts and then slaps a hand over her mouth.
“Maisie!” Andrea scolds, horrified.
She winces. “Sorry, but you know how much I love Johnny! ”
Andrea stares at her friend, contemplating for a moment before turning to Carter and saying. “Remember when that model dumped her drink on your head at a bar? Well, it was because Maisie told her you were married.”
The memory sparks amusement in Maisie’s eyes. “Oh yeah, I remember that. That was hilarious.”
“I, too, find your jealousy hilarious,” Carter says, clucking her chin with his knuckle.
She bats his hand away. “As if. Besides, what is there to be jealous of when I already know that I’m the one that gets you har—”
“La la la la!” Andrea yells, plugging her ears. She presses her face into my arm. “Julian, please make them stop before my ears start to bleed.”
Carter—the doofus that he is—says the one thing that I’d pay an arm for him not to. “Mr. Perfect over there has a criminal record!”
His blurted statement is met with dead silence.
Dead. Fucking. Silence.
Maisie’s whistle cuts through it like a knife as she crosses her arms. “Well, well, well.”
Andrea leans back into her seat and I can feel her staring at me with a confused look on her face. I’m going to kill him. “Carter,” I growl.
Letting out an awkward laugh, scratching the back of his head as he asks, “Too far?”
I glare at him. “You think?”
He scratches the back of his chin and exchanges a look between the two women. “I’m. . .kidding?”
“Shut up, Carter.” Turning her attention to me, Maisie regards me in a new light and I wouldn’t say I like it at all. “What’d you do?”
I try not to bristle, but fuck. This is something you bring up gradually after people have known you for some time.
I search for the best words but can’t seem to find any.
I go with my only option, the truth. I start with, “I was a stupid kid with a shit life.” I can’t find the courage to look at Andrea yet.
I’m too afraid of what I’ll see. “Before you judge me, I don’t try to hide my record.
All you have to do is look it up. I've been in a lot of bad situations that I could've reacted to better, but I didn't, so yeah, I have a criminal background that's longer than some people's grocery list.”
“Have you been to jail?”
I dip my chin.
“For what?”
My jaw clenches. “Home invasion.”
Maisie frowns. “How old were you?”
“Seventeen.”
Her brows lift. “Did you hurt anyone?”
“ Maisie ,” Andrea hisses, and it has me looking over at her. Her soft eyes bore into mine and I can immediately tell whatever the rest of the story is, she’s on my side. As simple as that. Something surges inside my chest. “You don’t have to answer her.”
“You’re dating him. Don’t you want to know?
” Maisie questions Andrea, who’s glaring daggers at her best friend.
I wouldn’t fault her if she did. I’m not ashamed of it.
I’d just prefer not to talk about it in an interrogation manner.
At Andrea’s silence, she turns to me and asks, “Is that the only time?”
My jaw clenches and I wish I was somewhere else right about now so I could shake the reminders of my past from my skin.
“I’ve had a couple of run-ins with the cops.
They didn’t like kids like me—they saw us as no more relevant than trash loitered on the side of the roads.
” They fucked with us whenever they could and got off on using their power to terrify children who had no one to defend them.
“I’m sorry,” Maisie says quietly. “That had to suck.”
I huff a laugh. “An understatement.”
Andrea loops her arms around one of mine and leans her head against my shoulder.
She’s comforting me, I realize dumbly. I’ve admitted to having a criminal record, and she’s comforting me.
I look again at the people around me and see something opposite of disgust. I see understanding and it puts an unyielding grip on my heart.
Carter still looks guilty as he motions toward his face. “If you want to punch me I understand.”
I shake my head. “I think we both know you’ll beat yourself up enough.”
He nods, lips pursed as he winces. Maisie uses it as an excuse to smack the rim of his baseball cap down so that it covers his eyes. “You shouldn’t air people’s shit out. That was very uncool of you.”
He narrows his eyes at her. “Don’t make me feel worse than I already do,” he grumbles.
“Julian.” Andrea’s soft voice catches my attention.
I turn away from the battle of scowls and look down to find gentle eyes focused on me.
There’s something fiery behind them—something fierce as she says, “I’m sorry you were forced to talk about it, but I want you to know that it doesn’t change anything. ”
My brows pinch together. “It doesn’t?”
A single shake of her head. “No.”
It doesn’t change anything . I’m still just Julian to her.
The same Julian I was when we shared popcorn on the couch at Halloween.
The same Julian who caught her dancing in her underwear.
The same Julian she leaves notes around the apartment for.
I love that she’s always telling me random things about her day and that she takes an interest in mine.
My heart both warms and explodes in my chest, expanding beyond time.
That’s how it happens, doesn’t it?
It sneaks up on you. One moment, you’re living in your own little world until you somehow start to live in theirs.
A flash of auburn hair and a smile that wipes every slate clean because one minute you’re alone and the next, your broken soul is grasping for another’s.
One day I’m alive and then I meet a woman with a meadow in her eyes and I’m running through the softest air. Breathing and breathing and breathing so deeply that my lungs exist outside my body.
I’m not only alive.
I’m drawing breath for this. I’m drawing breath for her .
This is what the poets meant. They finally make sense of their chaos. I’ve become the paper begging her to ruin my skin with hands made of a thousand reasons to believe in it. To believe that I was put on this earth for this woman.
I was made to pour my love into her gentle heart—made to remember the beat of it.
Her nails softly scratch my thigh, and I let myself settle into the comfort she offers with ease.
I’m in trouble.
An immense amount of it.
Deep, deep fucking trouble.