Tessa

After successfully avoiding both Lane and Drea all day, I call Cara after track practice and beg her for a ride to my car. She shows up ten minutes later.

“Dude, I almost didn’t recognize you,” I say, pointing at her preschool teacher get up as I slide into the passenger seat. “Do you really wear glasses? Or do they just go with your teacher persona?”

“I legit have bad eyes,” she explains woefully as she turns out of the parking lot and onto the road. “My hearing rocks though.”

“Yeah?” I mean, that’s good news and all.

“Absolutely. Give it go. Lay it on me. Let me do some serious listening,” she prods until I finally pick up one of the hints she’s so blatantly dropping.

“Oh. You want, like, an explanation.”

“Bingo.”

“God, that’s a real thing today with people.” I scooch down into the seat, imagining what it might feel like to be swallowed up and hidden away within the stuffing.

“Listen, you can’t go around leaving the club with some hot guy, then calling for a ride the next day when we both know you live with said hot guy...and go to school with him. Not to mention, Drea’s gotta be around here somewhere too. And yet, I got the call. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to take the call, but why did I get the call?”

I twist my mouth back and forth to give her a visual of the distaste this conversation is stirring up for me. Then I sigh, loudly, dramatically, and begin, “Hot guy, let’s call him Casey, is a very nice guy, but we’re not close in the sort of way that I could ask him for a ride. Plus, on campus we agreed to ignore each other, so that’s what I do. I take long, lengthy walks from class to class, just to make sure I’m extra good at it. And Drea and I had a fight. So... there you go.”

“She doesn’t like hot guy? And no, let’s not call him Casey. Casey’s that douche you were dancing with the other night who hit on every girl on his way out before leaving with Nat.”

“No!”

Her eyes widen. “Oh, yeah!”

“Gross.” Not for either one of them in particular. It’s a very generalized gross. “Fine, we don’t have to call him Casey. Unless Drea asks. Then, you call him Casey.”

Her brow arches and her lips purse briefly. “My ears, man. So damn good.”

I laugh. “Fine. Here it is. Drea hates him but she’s overjoyed at the thought of my hooking up with a man last night, so, rather than face the obvious writing on the wall across the hall, she opted to conclude that I wound up with Casey...somehow. Whatever. It makes her happy.”

“But, then why are you fighting?”

“Because she went on to give this whole speech about how screwed I am with Lane and how I need to stay away from him unless I want him to keep taking advantage of me. I don’t know. It went in a few different directions, most of them really offensive. To me. She can think whatever she wants about Lane, but me, she knows!”

“Lane. Yeah, that’s what we’re calling him.” She winks. As if nothing else I said ever made it in.

“Seriously? Your awesome hearing may not be as on point as you think,” I mutter, sitting up taller when I realize we’re coming up to the club.

“Oh, no, girl, I heard you just fine. Drea’s mad because you’re not acting like the responsible one, which means she has to and she’s not any good at it. So, you have to cut her slack, ‘cause she’s trying and she’s gotta let you do your thing, and Lane is going to keep taking whatever the hell he wants because you sure as hell wanna give it to him.” She wiggles her brows at me, grinning.

“Wow. That was pretty spot on.”

She points at her right ear. “So. Damn. Good.”

The car comes to a stop beside mine and I reach for the handle to get out. “Thanks for being a pal.”

“It’s our thing,” she reminds me.

“And the whole Lane thing,” I pause, not sure what I really want to say here.

“Is nobody’s damn business,” Cara finishes for me.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Drea’s car is still gone when I get home. It’s been a long day, but I’m still not ready to talk to her, so I’d just as soon she stays out for a while, Lord knows, she’ll be banging down my door as soon as she gets back.

Since it’s my night off from the basement, also known as my catch up on everything I’ve been putting off all week night, I take advantage of having the apartment to myself which can only increase productivity as far as I’m concerned.

I’ve got the first load of laundry running, the dishwasher is started, and my bedroom has been vacuumed, when I choose the largest area of carpet in the living room to plop down on. Spreading out my books and notes in a half circle all around me, I examine my options and decide on the speech I’m supposed to give tomorrow morning. My notes thus far include the topic. And nothing else.

I slide my laptop out from underneath a pile of notebooks I have stacked to my left and I dive in. Research. It’s my favorite part. I love gathering information. Learning it. Breathing it. Taking it in until I understand every angle of it. It’s what I find most appealing about journalism too. Knowing I get to learn everything first, piece the puzzle together before I share the completed story with the rest of the world.

Breaking only to move clothes from the washer to the dryer and the hamper to the washer, I spend the next three hours submerged in studying. I’m so deep into the speech I’m writing, it takes me a second to pull out of my non-stop running train of thought and fully register the sound of a key turning in the lock.

I hold my breath, wondering which one of the two people who have a key I would prefer to see walking in right now. It’s kind of tied. Drea’s still not off my shit-list, but Lane...is on my what the hell do I do when I see him now list? We agreed to no expectations. No relationship. Just, well, sex, I guess. But what does that leave us with in between? And how often are we doing the sex thing? Like, if he walks in here two seconds from now, how appropriate is it for me to tackle him and strip naked? I’m speaking purely theoretical of course. Not that I would really do that. But, I still want to know if I could.

Groaning in slight frustration over being left in limbo behind the closed door, I unfold my legs and get to my feet, purposely dragging them over the carpet as I go because I’m super unimpressed with having to contemplate all of this right now.

Well, I was. Now that the door is open and I’m looking at the sexier half of my contemplations, I’m experiencing a warm fluttery surge of pleasant emotions all throughout my body. And I’m really re-evaluating the likelihood of my tackling theory being welcomed by him.

“You know, a guy could easily start to wonder about your lack of regret when he doesn’t hear from you all day following a stormy exit from his bed first thing in the morning.” His brow is cocked to match the smirk on his oh-so-sexy lips. Oh, he would so be up for being tackled.

“Sorry, I don’t know the standard protocol when it’s not a one-night stand but it’s not a relationship either. Was I supposed to call?” I tease, though I am sort of wondering. Our arrangement hasn’t been the most conventional sort thus far. I’m obviously not clear on how to proceed.

“A text might have been nice. A naked greeting at the door when I got home would have been better.” Tackling next time for sure. He steps in closer, his hands finding my waist almost as naturally as his lips find mine.

“I had stuff to do,” I mumble into his open mouth.

“What sort of stuff,” he asks, our kiss continuing in spite of this conversation.

“Studying and laundry stuff.” I wrap both arms around his neck and pull him closer. My paper can wait. This, the hot-guy-wanting-to-kiss-me business, cannot.

I back up until I reach the sofa and carefully slide my way over the backrest down into the cushions, Lane skillfully coming down on top of me. This obviously isn’t his first sofa. But I’m not thinking about that.

I’m not sure I’m thinking about anything.

Thoughts aren’t possible when his hands are moving over my skin the way they are right at this second. Nor can anyone expect me to think when his mouth is crushing mine, tongue tantalizing me in ways that make me want to roll my eyes back into my head and just give myself over to him to do with as he pleases, because God knows it would please me.

And please me he does. Several times before we both wind up hanging haphazardly off the side of the sofa, gasping for air with super cheesy matching grins plastered all across our faces.

“I’m hungry. You hungry?” he asks, his hand moving through my hair, gently cupping the side of my head.

“I could eat.” Like a boatload of nachos. Or an extra large pizza with extra everything. I’m freaking starving.

“We need a phone,” he says, stretching his hand out over the floor and lifting the first article of clothing he can reach. My tank top. Not gonna find any phones in there.

“How about a laptop?” I ask, my fingertips just barely reaching the keys if I push them out as far as I possibly can.

“That will work.” He flips on top of me, his long arm moving over mine until he can grab the computer and bring it to us. I’m not sure if this is an act of ridiculous laziness or simply a desire to bask in the comforts of a post sex wrap up, where you’re still blissfully unaware of how awkward it is to be naked in front of another human being, either way, I like it.

My eyes move to the screen, wondering what he’s craving tonight and if it will turn out to be anything my taste buds are into.

“How’s Chinese sound?” he asks, pulling up the website to Wasabi Box, this great little place right down the street from us.

“Sounds kind of amazing.” They make the best noodles. My stomach starts to growl just thinking about them.

We scour the menu for several minutes before placing an order far too massive for two people to ever consume, and then, we’re back to dangling in a tangled up mess on the couch.

“Is it weird that we’re adding food to our arrangement?” I ask, after silently contemplating whether or not it’s a question I even want answered.

“Roommates eat takeout together all the time,” he answers, a relaxed lull to his deep voice.

“Right. That makes sense.” I’m not sure it really does, but I can roll with it.

Silence sets in for a brief moment of peace before the next question hounds me, begging to be verbalized.

“So, am I like a rebound thing? Is that what the whole nothing more than sex thing is about? Because you know it’s not real anyway?”

His arm wraps around me loosely, his fingers lazily tracing up and down my spine. “You’re not a rebound.”

“How do you know? I mean, it seems logical. Everyone does the rebound thing even though no one ever recognizes it for what it is while it’s happening,” I reason. I kind of want to be his rebound, if only so that I can label this thing and understand it better. And, naturally, feel as though I have some sort of control over all of it.

“I already did the rebound thing. That’s how I know.”

I lift my head to look at him. “You did? When?” Jules flashes in my mind for one horrific second, then I watch him grin, his eyes still closed like he’s hardly bothered by any of this.

“Right after the whole wedding fell apart. Our wedding planner, Jaelynn, and I were spending all this time together, canceling everything and trying to salvage whatever finances we could. It just kind of happened.”

It takes a second for me to fully understand what he’s saying. “You dated your wedding planner?”

He chuckles. “I know. It sounds bad. But she was like my one ally when everything was falling apart all around me. For a split second there, I think we both believed it was fate or something.” He shakes his head, eyes squinting open to catch my gaze. “Like you said, no one ever knows they’re doing the rebound thing while they’re doing it.”

“Huh.”

The hand traveling up and down my back catches a strand of hair and tugs it. “What? More questions?”

I shake my head. “Nope.” At least none I have the balls to ask anymore.

“You sure?”

My fingers trace the outline of a mermaid displayed in full color on his lower arm and the want to know outweighs my reasons not to. “Your tattoos. You have all this amazing art all over your body. It’s stunning and unique and so much of it is so clearly a part of you, but then you wear the most boring clothes known to man and cover them all up. What’s up with that?”

He shifts around under me and I get the sense I’ve made him uncomfortable. “Are we back on the khakis you don’t like?”

“I mean, I wouldn’t be against burning those, but you seem to like them so far be it from me to try and talk you out of wearing them.”

Lane’s chest steadies beneath mine again and his breathing settles into a calm rhythm as he contemplates my question. “I started getting them when I was seventeen, because I knew a guy. Of course, that meant keeping them hidden from my parents was a given. Even after I was of age, it was easier to just pretend I didn’t have any. Wasn’t until I was twenty and had the first full sleeve done that they ever saw me in a short sleeve shirt and realized what I’d been doing to myself.”

“Seriously? They never saw you in short sleeves until the whole arm was covered?”

He shrugs. “I was away at college. They hardly ever saw me anyway, so it was easier for them to miss than you might imagine.”

“So then what? They freaked out?”

He laughs, but it’s resentful. “Um, sure. We could say they freaked out. It was kind of a shit storm, and the tattoos were only the beginning. Turns out they pretty much hated everything I was about. My father couldn’t stop telling me how disappointed he was in the man I was becoming. How I was his only son, and how I better step up and make the right choices, because I’m the legacy he leaves behind and as it stood, he’d rather have told people I died, than claim me as his own.”

“Holy shit,” I mutter. “I thought I had bad parents.”

His arm curls around me again, holding me close. “Want to talk about it?”

“Not even a little bit.” I lift my head, chin propped on his chest so I can see him. “So, did you?”

“What?”

“Make the right choices?”

He squints, staring off across the room, “For a while. In the end what’s right for him, might never be what’s right for me. And I haven’t figured out yet how to make that work us.”

I almost press the issue, follow my desire to dig deeper into the past he’s so set on ignoring. Thankfully, there’s a loud knock before I can open my mouth again and Lane scrambles off the sofa to pull on a pair pants and get the door. Saved by the Chinese Takeout Guy.

Lane

When I notice Tessa get up and leave the room to go put clothes on, I’m almost sorry I told her eating together was a roommate thing. Then, when she comes strolling back out of her room, hair tied loosely in a messy braid over her shoulder, a worn out, nearly see-through white tee-shirt casually hugging her curves until they meet the waistband of her leggings, I’m not so sorry anymore.

Tessa’s natural beauty is breathtaking at any given moment of the day, even though she rarely smiles unprovoked. Truth is, I think it’s my favorite thing about her. She makes me work for it. Makes me earn that smile, and God, it’s so worth it.

“You must really like egg rolls,” I tease, soaking in the genuinely pleased expression on her face and fully taking in the knowledge that I put it there. That I have the ability to do that.

She shrugs, a mischievous flare flashing in her bright green eyes. “Sure. It’s the egg rolls.” Then she just stands there, taking in the scene before her.

It’s right around now, I start wondering why I laid out all the food on the floor, as if we’re kids about to have some sort of picnic. It seemed natural in the moment, plopping down here in the center of the room, where all of her stuff is still spread out. “We can move to the table,” I point out, already reaching for the closest takeout box to get moving.

“Why?” She plops down across from me, legs crossed in her lap, and starts to examine her choices. “This is perfect.”

I watch her one handedly track down the box of lo-mein she ordered, while using the other to snag an egg roll, which she proceeds to move to her mouth, holding it there with her teeth temporarily until she gets one of her large textbooks situated in her lap and can make use of her egg roll hand again. She fascinates me. The way she does everything to her own liking, never caring what’s expected and striving only to meet her own standards, which ironically are higher than most.

“Are you going to eat?” she asks, pointing her half-eaten egg roll at me.

“Is that your subtle way of letting me know there won’t be much left if I don’t hurry?” I joke, picking up a set of chopsticks and a random box of food before I lean back against the inside of the sofa.

“I’m not nearly as concerned about you getting your share of dinner as you might think, roomie. Mostly, I just want you to stop staring at me,” she mutters, eyes sweeping over the pages of her open textbook while she blindly stabs away at her noodles.

“Worried I’m psychoanalyzing you again.” I pop a piece of orange chicken into my mouth and wait for her next comeback.

“Not as worried as you should be about becoming the star of this assignment if you don’t quit.”

“Why, what’s the topic? Sexy professors? Hot casual hookups? Roommates you want to see naked?” I can keep these coming all night.

She looks up, clearly fighting a smirk and definitely losing. “Famous Psychopaths in History.”

I take a second, rolling my lip over my teeth while I decide how I want to take that one. “Think I have what it takes to be famous?”

She shakes her head, laughing, then returns her attention to the book she’s reading. Guess we’re calling that round a tie.

“So, this the stuff you want to write about when you’re a journalist?” I ask, apparently incapable of entertaining myself when she’s sitting right across from me and far more interesting than anything else I can think of.

She peers up at me, lifting only her eyes to meet mine. “Psychopaths specifically? Not so much. But, people, yeah.”

That explains the few hundred biographies she has stashed around this apartment. “How long have you known this was what you wanted to do?” Because I’m several years older than she is, and I still haven’t got that shit sorted out.

She sits up taller, abandoning her research efforts for the time being and I internalize the satisfaction of knowing I rate higher than school work. “When I was nine I had to write a paper on my hero. I spent all weekend trying to come up with someone to write about only to keep winding up with fictional superheroes I knew weren’t meant to be included. So, Sunday evening, I walked down to the library and asked to see the heroes section.” She grins, remembering her nine-year-old self, “Anyway, I was blown away with the stories I found. Stories about real people. People who didn’t look so special or different from the people I knew in real life, but who had clearly made very different choices. And thus, began my obsession.”

“With biographies?”

“With people.”

I set down my box of dinner, hand resting in my lap while I make no bones about studying her and the story she just shared. “You were nine?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And when asked to write about your hero, you didn’t just...write about your mom? Or your dad?” That’s what I did. Wrote about my father. Though, it’s not a mistake I would make a second time.

She laughs harshly. “Yeaaah, no. My parents were never my heroes.”

“That how you wound up living here? With your aunt?” I should stop asking questions. I know that. It’s getting too deep. Too personal. Even if I try to spin it as a roommate conversation, we’re stepping way out of bounds for the second time tonight already.

Tessa sighs, the sort of sigh that escapes when the moment you’ve been dreading but always knew would come eventually, finally arrives.

“More or less. My mother was hot mess while I was growing up, mostly still is, though she’s supposedly sober now and I’m told that makes a difference. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen or spoken to her in years. My dad was some UPS dude who would make deliveries at the liquor store she was working at when she got pregnant with me. She never saw him again after that. Social Services tried finding him once but, given all my mother could tell them was, ‘the name on his patch said Steve’ there wasn’t quite enough to go on. So, I was born to a young single mom with four babies already in tow before I ever came along, who had no steady job, no steady home and no steady frame of mind. By the time I was twelve, I’d been bounced around from one family member to the next for four years before landing back with my mom for yet another split second only to wind up getting hauled off by a social worker when someone caught wind of the fact we were all living in a broke down car in the parking lot behind the convenience mart she was running at the time.

“By then, my two oldest brothers were already over eighteen and living on their own. They petitioned to have my seventeen-year-old and fifteen-year-old brothers move in with them and the judge went for it, which left just us girls. My sister, Riley, hadn’t ever been split from my mom, and my mom finagled a deal to get her back. So then it was down to just me. Me and this really rockin’ social worker who sat with me until I believed her when she told me, I wasn’t the problem, they were. That I wasn’t too broken to be loved, they were just too broken to know how to love me.

“She searched hell and high water, and somehow tracked down the only family member, I’d never lived with, other than my dad. My great Aunt Edi. After her, I never saw my social worker ever again. But I guess the seed was planted, you know? She was there in this pivotal moment of my life. It could have gone in so many different directions, none of them good, and there she was, like my real-life fairy godmother, saving me. Sending me home for a happy ever after.” On the outside her smile stretches over her teeth, but on the inside, I know another small part of her is dying, remembering how happy ever after wasn’t nearly long enough. Because her Aunt Edi’s gone. And she was it.

And I’m a shit trade off. She really should have swung a few more times at me with that umbrella. If for no other reason than it would probably do her some good to beat the shit out of something.

“So that’s why seeing your sister this morning was so important. She’s still with your mom.”

She nods. “We only just got in touch a few months ago. Riley hasn’t had it easy and I just want to do the best I can, to do for her what my aunt did for me, you know?”

I do.

“What about your brothers?”

She turns her gaze downward, fidgeting with the corners of the pages in her book. “No idea. They weren’t big on keeping in touch. Not that I blame them. The way we grew up, it was every man for himself, push forward and don’t look back, or else that’s it. You fall, you go under. You don’t come back up.”

I nod slowly, trying like hell to keep my expression blank, to not show the fury rising inside me, or the ache spreading in my chest as I start to understand the weight she carries with her, the reasons she is the way she is, but it’s damn hard. “So that’s why.”

“Why what?”

Our eyes lock and all I can hear is the pounding of my own heart, thundering against my ribs. “You don’t fall.”