Page 9 of Just Screwing Around

“What the fuck?” A loud voice bellowed through my sweet little coffee shop just as I was pulling a promising looking batch of muffins from the oven. I looked up to see my brother stomping in like a cranky storm cloud. I poured a dark roast into a large cup and put it on the counter.

“What’s up your ass, sunshine?” I asked.

He scowled at me, then at the coffee, but ultimately took it. He took a sip that likely burned his tongue, but he didn’t even flinch. “When were you going to tell me that the rental you moved into is in Nick fucking Perez’s house?”

Oh.

Shit.

This city is more like a small town, I swear. I pulled a muffin from the tin and placed it on the counter as a peace offering. “How’d you find out about that?”

“Not from you.” His voice was all snarly and annoying.

Point taken.

I let my shoulders drop. “I was going to tell you. I only just moved in. But seriously, why can you guys not just get over this whole thing?”

He opened his mouth to reply, but I cut him off.

“Scratch that, I don’t want to hear it again. Yes, I am living there. The house is nice, the rent is reasonable and it’s close to work. You forget that before you two decided to scrap like a couple of feral cats, I was friends with him, too. So even though you guys hate each other, you have to admit it’s better than me living with a stranger.”

He continued to glare.

“Stranger danger, you know?” I pushed the muffin closer to him and finally he picked it up and took an obnoxiously big bite.

“For the record, I don’t like this.” He chewed a few times then pointed to the muffin. “I do like this though, so I’m going to let it go. For now.” He stalked over to where he was installing booth seating along the windows.

“That could have gone worse,” Kim said, as she appeared at my shoulder. The girl loved drama so long as it wasn’t her own.

“Could have gone better, too.”

Over the next week life fell into a new routine. It was hard to complain about living with Nick when I barely saw the guy.

He worked late.

I went to bed early.

Generally, I left for work before he was up. So, if my goal was to avoid conflict then I was acing this roommate thing. If my goal was to ride the guy like a mechanical bull at a tacky western bar, well, I’d failed. I had never had an issue with being single. I had restarted my career so many times, I still felt like I was twenty years old in some ways. Other ways, like how my knees cracked when I squatted down or the wiry gray hairs that randomly sprouted near my temple, I was a crumbling relic of the nineties.

Whether I liked being single or not, there was something about sharing a space with a man I’d crushed on since I was a teenager that turned the dial on my libido from warm to flaming.

I hadn’t seen him bring any women home. From what I had seen, he was too busy for a relationship. Which made banging the roommate the perfect set up. More than that though, I could relate to the exhaustion. And I knew that someone could be surrounded by people and still be a little lonely. Having people was one thing, having a person - your person - was something completely different. If nothing else I could make the guy’s life a little less routine and hell, maybe even a little easier.

I had been leaving leftovers from my bakery experiments on the counter, and they’d been gone when I’d gotten home. I was curious what he and his crew thought of my recipes. I was also dying to know if he had spotted my little friend in the shower. Hard to torture the guy when I didn’t see him. Just as I finished that thought, the door opened and a harried looking Nick walked through it. This was the earliest I’ve seen him home in the week I’d been here. “I was starting to think you were a figment of my imagination.”

“Been missing me?” he said. It was meant as a joke, but it was hard to laugh when the circles under his eyes were so dark.

“Not as much as you’ve been missing sleep. You look like you’ve been hit by a bus.”

He ran a hand through his too-long dark hair and sawdust sprinkled onto his shirt. “I’m short a few guys, so I’ve been pulling double duty as boss and framer.”

I opened my mouth to suggest he ask Derek if he can spare anyone, but quickly shut it again. I had no interest in getting in the middle of their dick measuring contest. Derek’s grudge wasn’t my grudge and vice versa. If one of them had legitimately been wronged it would be one thing, but that wasn’t the case as far as I knew. They were just both stubborn.

Being in his kitchen with him, one on one, without the presence of my brother and their idiotic feud, I could see him as the guy I grew up with. And see that his usual easy smile was hard to find.

“I’ve got a casserole cooking, more than enough for two if you want to share.” I pulled the dish out of the oven, and he leaned over my shoulder to look. He smelled like pine and sweat. Not a great combination under normal circumstances but at the moment, it was working for me.

“It isn’t tuna casserole, is it? I have PTSD from my mom making that all the time when I was a kid.”

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