Page 43 of Salacious Park Avenue Prince

“You didn’t hear them last night?‘Caleb, you’re back.’”

“Dammit, I’m not back. I was forced into this situation, and you know it.” Frustration ate at me, and I rubbed at the furrow between my brows. One casual gathering on the roof didn’t mean shit other than we were going to have to learn to live with each other. The fact that it would probably be easier with them than with Travis definitely said…something. Nothing good.

JT shut his laptop and crossed his arms on top of it. “So talk to me. Tell me what happened so I understand where you’re coming from, because I have to tell you, right now my mind is blown.”

I snorted a derisive laugh. “Why, because I’m not Park Avenue Prince material?”

“No, because you are.” Before I could deny it, he added, “You were friends with them. Now you can’t stand them. Don’t you get why I’m a little confused over here?”

“Didn’t you ask West about it?”

“I’m askingyouabout it.”

A sigh escaped me as I lowered my hand and began to absently trace the wood grain patterns on the table. Considering JT was one of the only people I cared to spend time with, it was only right I let him in on what went down. Noteverything, because there were only two people in this world that would ever know the real story. I’d go to my grave with that. But the rest…

I blew out a long breath. “Our parents got together when we were fourteen. My dad moved Travis and his mom into our place, and all of a sudden I was sharing my house with this stranger who was so different to me. I thought I would hate him. All I knew was that he’d done movies as a kid and only wore designer clothes, so I figured he’d be a pretentious asshole I wouldn’t have anything in common with.”

“But?”

“But what?”

“I hear a ‘but’ in there somewhere. Like he was all those things,butyou thought he was cool anyway?”

He had no idea. Travis had blown into my life like a hurricane, and nothing had been the same since. “Something like that.”

“So…you were friends?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We were best friends. Up until our parents got married, we did everything together, and yeah, that included hanging out with his other friends. East was always the worst of them, but the rest could be a lot of fun back then.”

“Even Daire?”

I reached for the soda in my bag. “Nah, Daire wasn’t around. He didn’t join the group until after I left.”

“Oh. Soyouleft. They didn’t kick you out?”

Good God, just spit it out already.“Long story short, Travis and I had a falling-out, and I decided to remove myself from the situation. He’s not exactly the type to make things easy when he doesn’t like you, and I didn’t wanna deal with all the backlashI knew I’d get, so…” I shrugged, like that hadn’t been a painful, confusing time in my life. “It was better to do my own thing and keep our lives separate.”

“By cutting off all your friends?”

“They were his friends first.”

“I’m sure they wouldn’t have chosen sides?—”

“Then you don’t know them that well, do you?”

JT’s mouth snapped shut, and he swallowed. “Go on.”

“Needless to say, none of them took it well. If you’re not their friend, you’re nobody, so when Travis gave me shit, they followed his lead.” When JT paled, I added, “They didn’t hatch some crazy revenge plot or anything, don’t worry. More like we all just took to opposite sides of Manhattan and tried to keep it that way.”

“Damn. I’m sorry.”

“It is what it is. I just hate that the timing was so fucked, because I would’ve chosen to go to school somewhere else. But everything went down our senior year, and we’d all already been accepted to Astor. Our parents had gotten us condos at the Towers. I mean, it was all planned. Too late to change anything.”

“So you’ve been stuck having to see them all the time when you just wanted your own space.” He nodded slowly. “I get it.”

He got some of it, but definitely notallof it. But no one did. Not really. Travis and I had a complicated relationship, one that not everyone would understand, and I wasn’t quite ready to see if JT was one of them.

So while I was willing to open up about most of what happened back then, I definitely wasn’t giving all the details. Instead, I stuck to the easy ones. The ones that made sense.

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