Page 13 of Break Me
I don’t care if her jokes are lame. I’m just glad she’s smiling.
By the time we get back to Riley’s condo, we still have a few hours before Ava is supposed to show. I called her, refusing to text her the address. She sounded annoyed, but not annoyed enough to cancel on me.
On Riley, as it is.
Riley, for her part, is already on her second drink. She comes alive when she’s drunk, and I know she’s drinking from nerves. She isn’t social. She’s got rum and Diet, her usual. I haven’t touched anything that’s in the freezer yet. If I drink too much, well…it’s not a good first impression.
I heard Riley speaking to Caden on the phone earlier, telling him about Ava coming over. I heard, too, her amused reassurances that another threesome wouldn’t happen with me, here in this apartment. And then Caden text me to reiterate his point. Clarifying neither this apartment nor any of the two he owns. Or anywhere, with Riley. How that dude is going to get any work done during the week he’s away if he’s so busy micromanaging Riley, I have no idea.
We’re sitting beside each other on the cream-colored couch in the living room. Riley has her feet tucked up under her, still in the black tank top and jeans she wore this morning. I changed out of my sweatpants because it seemed like the polite thing to do, even though I’m pretty sure I caught Ava staring at my ass in them when I held the door open for her in the English building.
I’m pretty, sure, too, that she’s the type of girl that would know I paid over a fucking grand for them. Riley doesn’t appreciate that shit. She thinks it’s a waste. Ava, though…I think she’d get it.
“Look,” Riley says, gesturing toward me with her half-full glass, “if you wanna sleep with Ava, please do so at your own condo.”
Which is across the hall from hers. Her mom’s is beside her.
I laugh, rubbing a hand over my face. I see Riley’s eyes on my tattoos, but she hasn’t asked about them, which I like. People love asking about the meaning of ink, but the reality is sometimes it doesn’t have a meaning. Sometimes it’s just a feeling. I mean, what the fuck do skulls and roses and rosaries and a woman praying on her knees mean anyway?
I like to leave that shit up to people’s imaginations.
They don’t need to know Bianca was Catholic. That she fucked me up, and that it’s because of her I went to prison. They don’t need to know any of that shit. No one really wants to know my demons, least of all me.
“You mean you don’t wanna join in?” I ask Riley, watching as she blushes, takes a sip from her drink. She doesn’t meet my eyes.
My arm is hooked around the back of the couch, body angled toward her, but she’s at the opposite end. There’s plenty of space between us. Besides, even though he annoys the fuck out of me, I love Caden. And her. I wouldn’t fuck that up.
“That was a one-time thing,” Riley says, finally meeting my eyes.
I smirk at her. “Right,” I drawl, “that’s what they all say.”
Riley rolls her eyes and takes another gulp of her drink, the ice sliding and hitting her teeth. She winces then sets the drink down on the side table.
“You know anything about Ava?” I ask her. Ava had been in the English building and Riley is an English major.
But Riley frowns. “No,” she muses. “But then again, I don’t know much about anyone there.” She glares at me. “Antisocial, remember?”
I bite my lip, nodding. “That’s right,” I murmur. I glance at the clock above the flat screen mounted on the wall across from us. We’ve got an hour or so before Ava arrives or ditches us, which means it’s time.
I stand to my feet. “Be right back.” I feel Riley’s eyes on me as I leave the living room, walking on the plush carpet down the hallway to the guest bathroom. I close and lock the door, pull out the prescription bottle from my back pocket, shake one of the pills lose into my hand, turn on the sink and scoop up some water as I toss the Xanax in my mouth, swallowing.
I’m not addicted. Not yet. But sometimes, when I catch my own reflection in the mirror like now, I kind of wish I was.
Because even though my expression is neutral, all I can see when I meet my own gaze is how I must have looked then, nearly three years ago when I fucked that dude up. How I must have looked when I got in my Range Rover, when I put it in Reverse and…
There’s a knock on the bathroom door.
I screw the cap back on the pills and shove them in my pocket.
Why the hell is Riley knocking? She has her own bathroom. In fact, there’s two other bathrooms in this fucking place.
I unlock the door and pull it open.
She has her arms crossed and she’s leaning against the doorframe, eyes narrowed. Her cheeks are flushed, and I know she’s drank a lot in a short amount of time, and I wonder if that’s why she’s looking so confrontational right now.
“What?” I ask, shrugging.
“How many do you take a day?”
