Never Sweeter(59)

Except in her head, where all the conversations she wished she’d had played out, over and over again.





Chapter 18


She knew the sound was a bad one. But she didn’t fully understand why until Tate made it super clear for her. He moaned in his sleep like a small disgruntled child, one hand dragging her pillow over his face in a way that would have seemed adorable. If it were not for his words. “Tell your buddy to come back at a reasonable time, like noon,” he said, and then the full weight of the situation was on her.

The sound was Lydia, knocking on her door.

“Tate, you have to get up. Tate. Get up. You fell asleep.”

“I know, and I would really love to keep making that mistake for another eight hours.”

“You can’t, remember. You had to be up at six thirty and it’s already seven ten.”

He turned his bleary face her way, hair all sleep mussed, eyes half open.

Wits as sharp and annoying as ever.

“That would be a really cool way to hide me from your friend if I seemed to care even a little tiny bit about practice this morning. But as I don’t, that just leaves us with your subterfuge.”

“I wasn’t trying to be sub…ter…fuge-ious. I was just…”

“Politely asking me to hide under your bed?”

She sighed, resigned. Flopped onto her back.

“I was thinking the bathroom.”

“Or…we could just say we studied real late.”

“In our underwear. In a room that smells like come.”

“The room is gonna smell like come either way, honey.”

“I’ll just leave her guessing as to who jizzed all over the room.”

“So it only matters if it was me, specifically.”

She didn’t think he intended to sound hurt. When she turned to look at him his face was all good-natured amusement. But it had been there, she was sure of it. A tiny fragment of pain at the thought of her hiding him, buried deep beneath several layers of teasing bluster and sleepy good-naturedness.

It made her tread carefully, even if it was only her imagination.

It made her put a hand on his arm, as reassuringly as she could.

“It just might seem a little weird, that’s all. I haven’t told her anything, beyond the fact that you bullied me in high school. She finds you in here and she’s going to think I have Stockholm syndrome.”

“Hey, I have never once kidnapped you. Stolen all your good sense, yes. Kidnapped, no.”

“You haven’t stolen all my good sense. My sense is there, fully intact. I just don’t know how to prove that to herso maybe if you could just take an extra long whiz right now…”

“I can do one better: I can leave a stench that will never leave your bathroom.”

“I will take that as the price I pay for sweeping you briefly under the carpet,” she said, intending something funny. And it worked, too. He snorted quietly as he ambled to the bathroom, as though the whole thing was just rolling off him.

But this time, he couldn’t quite cover over that hint of hurt.

She caught his wince, as slight as it was. She saw the slump of his shoulders.

The trouble wasshe just didn’t know what to do about it. When she finally opened the door Lydia just gave her such a look. Eyebrows raised, eyes dancing with delight, everything about her saying okay, dish. Tell me all about whoever you had in there. And then somehow the words just wouldn’t come. They clung to the back of her throat, in a way they definitely wouldn’t have if he had simply been some guy.

So she turned him into one.

“He was handing out flyers in the library,” she said, thankful for the sheepishness in her own voice. It made it sound real, instead of like some furtive little lie. Lydia even gasped with delight to hear it.

“And yet you did not IM me the moment it finished happening.”

“You cannot be annoyed that I didn’t IM you after.”

“I’m kind of annoyed that you didn’t IM me during. Now I know almost nothing about the person I am desperately trying to see over your shoulder.”

Letty glanced behind herself at that, as though an echo of Tate somehow still remained.

But there was nothing to see. Just the scene of the crimesheets still twisted into faintly sordid-looking shapes, the pillow he’d left curled like a recently salted slug, the hint of what could have been underwear peeping out from beneath her bed.

“He’s in the bathroom.”

“Tending to his wounds, huh?”

“Men these days just don’t know how to take a finger up the butt.”

“You did not put a finger up his butt. Are you lying? I can tell you’re lying, Letty.”

“I have to go now. I promise I will talk about how sore his butt is at lunch.”