Page 27 of Indigo Sky

Was he mad atme?

I narrowed my glare at him and asked, “Where’d you go?”

He stopped his pacing and looked at me. “What the fuck do you care?”

“Why are you pissed off at me?” I finally asked.

“I was angry, and I left that fuckin’ place, thinking you were coming with me, but you stayed there. Chatting it up with that fuckin’whore, letting her fuckin’ make out with you. Where the hell is your loyalty, huh? You get a tiny fuckin’ taste of pussy, and you, what? Forget everything I’ve done for you?”

My brows dropped heavily as I stared at him, incredulous. “What? Making out? Everything you’ve done forme? What the … wait, wait, wait.” I laid a hand over my forehead and squeezed my eye shut as what he’d said sank in. Then, I opened my eye and pointed a finger at him as I said, “You werewatchingme?”

Nate opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. He looked away and seemed to wilt. The big, tough guy shriveled away, and what was left was this … small husk of a man who dropped to the couch and held his head in his hands.

“I went back to ask if you wanted to meet me at Taco Bell.”

“Why didn’t you just call?”

He dropped his hands to let them hang between his knees as he looked up and met my eye. “I had literally just left the parking lot. I realized I’d been a fuckin’ dick, so I turned around and was gonna talk to you, but I saw that bitch—"

“Can you not call her that?” I interjected angrily. “She didn’t give you a dance. That doesn’t make her a bitch or a whore or whatever. She was doing herjob—"

“What-the-fuck-ever, Romeo. I saw you two talking in the parking lot. Then, you were making out, so I came back here and went to the bar across the street.”

My brain was spinning in circles and teetering between feeling sorry for the guy and disturbed as fuck that he’dwatchedme. I guessed, maybe, to some people, it would’ve sounded innocent enough. But he had come back instead of calling me. We both had cell phones. He could’ve just called. Why hadn’t hecalled?

“You could’ve just picked up the phone, Nate,” I muttered, crossing the living room to sit on the arm of the couch.

“Yeah, well, I had, like, two percent battery left anyway.”

“Hmm,” I grunted, nodding. That was likely.

Nate sucked at charging his phone. No reason to keep track of shit like that when hardly anybody called you. I would know.

“Anyway, sorry for being an asshole. I mean, it was my idea to go to the club. Not your fault she saw you as an easy target.” He shrugged and slumped back into the couch. “At least you got something out of it.”

“Yeah,” I murmured quietly, letting my head hang.

It hurt to think he might be right. I didn’t want to believe I’d been naive or anything, but it was a possibility, wasn’t it? She’d worked me up all night, and then she’d just happened to walk out into the parking lot the second I also happened to be standing there, alone? The more I thought about it, the stupider I felt.

“You good?” Nate asked, and I looked up to see an expression of genuine concern on his face. “You didn’t, like, fuck her, did you? ‘Cause, man—"

“No,” I said. “She just kissed me. We didn’t even really make out or anything. I guess I just thought—"

“What? That shelikedyou?” He laughed and reached out to slap my knee. “Dude, she’s supposed to act like that. She wants you to come back and give her more money. Don’t be stupid.”

Ihadbeen stupid, but I wasn’t going to let myself waste another second dwelling on it. I stood up and headed into my room to throw on some sweats and a T-shirt. Then, I came outand asked Nate if he wanted to hit up Taco Bell because I’d just realized I was starving for something other than pretty women and the manipulative shit they could do to my body.

***

I didn’t go back to Midnight Lotus for quite a while after that. Nate and I fell back into the old routine, and before I knew it, several years had flown by.

We were twenty-eight at this point.

I’d gotten myself a nice girlfriend—Emily. We had met at the shop, hit it off well enough, and started dating.

Meanwhile, Nate had gotten himself into some shit. Arrested for driving under the influence and another time for destruction of property after getting so drunk that he broke a few store windows along Main Street.

He was the troublemaker, and I was the jackass who kept bailing him out. Even my parents were getting sick of his shit despite caring for him as if he were one of their own. Honestly, at that point, it was a fucking miracle he’d managed to keep his job at Roy’s, but I thought that was more out of pity than anything else. Roy knew Nate wouldn’t hold down a job somewhere else, so he kept him on despite him being regularly late.

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