Page 2 of Your Echo
She laughs at that, a harsh and haughty laugh that grates against my headache.
“You’re wondering if we slept together, aren’t you?”
I shrug. “Did we?”
She steps closer, her defensive posture relaxing as she stares up into my eyes. “And what if we did?”
I swallow.
Shit shit fucking shit.
Then she bursts out laughing again, backing away from me to collapse onto her couch.
“Mon dieu, Ace. You’re something else.”
She pats the cushion beside her, motioning for me to sit down as she continues to laugh at me.
“Trust me, Ace,” Roxanne continues, “even if I wasn’t dating your bassist, that would never happen in a million years. I’ve seen you with your head bent over a toilet too many times to ever want it near any part of my body.”
Even with a raging hangover and a slowly easing sense of dread still coiled around my gut, Roxanne mentioning all the parts of her body makes my dick jump. I’d never touch her, at least not in my right state of mind—I’ve seen her and Cole tear each other to emotional shreds too much over the years to ever want something like what they have for myself—but sheissitting here in a robe so short it’s hard not to stare at her thighs.
She notices where my attention’s gone.
“Oh, fuck off,” she warns me. “You’re lucky your face is still okay after the things you said last night. Don’t push it.”
“What?” I ask. “Did you try to beat me up or something?”
“No, Cole did.” She sighs. “Sometimes I don’t know how Sherbrooke Station even manages to function.Vous êtes tous complètement fous.”
She’s probably right about that; everyone in the bandiscompletely crazy. I’d like to know just how much crazy I’m going to have to face today, though.
“Roxanne, what happened?”
“You got drunk. Really drunk.”
“Yeah, I gathered.”
She gets up and heads into her kitchen, switching on an expensive-looking coffee machine. For someone who manages a cafe for a living, she’s got a pretty sweet setup going on here. The apartment is huge by Montreal standards, and half the shit in here looks vintage in a cool, edgy kind of way—not the picked-it-up-on-the-side-of-the-road-because-it-was-free way that I’m used to seeing in my friends’ places.
“At the welcome back party, you told everyone you were just going to have one glass of champagne so you could make a toast. Then it was just one beer because you deserved it after making it through the whole tour sober. Then it was just one shot...” She opens a cupboard and pulls out two small white mugs. “We all saw where you were headed. I cut you off, but you disappeared with some guys for a bit and came back totally fucked. You were wearing a sombrero.”
I remember making that toast. Roxanne threw the band a party at the cafe last night to welcome us back to Montreal. We spent most of the summer on our first European tour and only landed two days ago. The last thing any of us wanted to do was drag our asses out to a party; after the non-stop travel and gigging, I could have slept for two weeks straight if I’d been allowed. No one wanted to say no after all the work Roxanne put in, though, and really, what kind of rock stars would we be if we bailed on a party to get some rest?
“Dedicated and successful ones,” Matt, our drummer, had grumbled to me when I asked him the same thing just before I got up to do my toast.
He’d wanted to be there even less than I had. The guy is a mother hen if I ever saw one, and I noticed him eyeing the glass in my hand with disapproval, but I shrugged it off. I could handle one fucking glass of champagne.
Apparently I was wrong.
“So where do we get to the part about Cole being threatening and me passing out on your balcony?”
“Cole offered to make sure you got home okay. He wanted to walk me home too, so we took you with us. You kept saying how much you needed to piss, so we brought you up to use my bathroom.”
I watch her do some complicated shit with the coffee machine before filling up the mugs and bringing them over.
“Roxanne, this is a really tiny coffee,” I tell her, reaching out to take the one she offers to me.
“It’s an espresso, and you’re an idiot. Drink it. It will help with your head.” She sets her own espresso down on the low table in front of us and continues with her story. “After we got you up here, you started acting like an asshole. I mean, more of an asshole. You wouldn’t leave. You kept asking how Cole and I ‘kept it interesting’ after all these years. You were...You said some really insulting shit.”
