“At least I didn’t lead her on and then dump her way after the fact,” Barrett returns.
North’s eyes seek mine and in them I can read his every thought. How could you tell him about us? That was private.
I shake my head at his silent theatrics.
“That’s none of your business,” North tells Barrett. Then he calmly says to me, “Catarina, would you like me to ask him to leave?”
A loud Ha! comes from Barrett, whose arms are now crossed stubbornly over his chest. Comparing them is like comparing apples to sledgehammers, but I do it anyway. North’s tidy, uptight clothing and fussily styled dark hair over a strong nose versus Barrett’s wrinkled white shirt and jeans, reddish hair and scruff. Both attractive in their own way, but one of them is leaps and bounds more attractive than the other.
“Catarina, answer me,” says the one who’s not winning.
“No,” I state.
“No what?” North asks, flabbergasted.
“No, I don’t want you to ask Barrett to leave.”
“Surely you didn’t invite him over.”
“I didn’t invite you over, either, and yet here you are.”
His eyelids narrow. “The dating is still pretend, correct? Just for the column. This hasn’t morphed into some debased attempt at a rebound relationship.”
Adrenaline shoots down my limbs in response to my ex-boyfriend’s insulting assumption. Barrett approaches me from behind, his body heat blanketing my back.
“North, I’d like you to leave,” I say. “I would thank you for checking on me, but I have a feeling your barging in was more about you than it was me.”
“It’s about you, Catarina.” North’s voice gentles. “The way it should’ve been about you before I let you go.”
Um.
What?
“You heard me,” my ex continues as if I spoke aloud. He glances at Barrett in challenge before lifting my hands with his. “I made a mistake. I came to apologize and ask you to give me another chance. I was confused.”
I must be hallucinating.
“Confused?” Barrett snaps.
“Stay out of it,” I tell him before this situation reaches Popeye and Bluto proportions. This Olive Oyl can take care of herself.
“You heard her,” North gloats. I’ve never seen him gloat before. Before I can tell him to go home, Barrett brushes by me so quickly my hair lifts on the breeze he creates.
“Thanks for the assist,” he mutters as he walks to my front door.
“Fox, you don’t have to—”
But when he turns, I notice his laptop under his arm. He dips his chin in a goodbye to me and then glowers at North. He heads down the hallway toward the elevators without another word.
North turns back to me.
“Smug isn’t a good look on you.” I shut him into my apartment but shatter his hopes a second later. “I’d like you to stay right in this spot until Barrett is gone. I don’t want you two scuffling in the parking lot.”
“Don’t want me to hurt your boyfriend?” More smugness. I can’t remember a time North was smug about anything.
“I don’t want him to hurt you.”
He lets out a disbelieving laugh.
“Can I at least get a drink?” But he’s already in my kitchen. He knows where everything is. The vodka in the freezer, what refrigerator drawer holds the limes, where I keep his favorite rocks glass...
“Help yourself.” Whatever keeps him from tromping downstairs and earning a black eye and a fat lip from the bad boy of the NFL. I carry my empty wineglass to the kitchen and North refills it for me.
“I meant what I said.” He’s trying for nice after behaving like a complete ass.
“I know you did,” I reply flatly. I take a guzzle of my wine. “I’m not interested.”
“In a relationship or my friendship?”
I’m not feeling magnanimous at the moment, so I answer, “Neither.”
Barrett
I drum my fingers on the steering wheel as I watch the front door of the apartment building and wait for North’s grand exit. I also have my eye on his pretentious, rich-boy Cadillac. The vanity plates read: NORTHROP3
What a prick.
Showing Kitty Cat my fucked-up column was humbling and a little embarrassing, but I was desperate. After pecking away for nearly six hours, I wasn’t sure which was crossed—a wire in my brain or my eyes. Probably my brain.
Dyslexia’s a bitch.
No, I’m not exaggerating. I have it. It’s like I always imagined people who wear glasses feel. The letters literally trade places after I’ve stared too long and I can’t tell if I typed it that way or if my brain is interpreting it wrong. I came over here expecting her to tell me I’d written the word three instead of there or renamed her Catrina instead of Catarina.
I was diagnosed when I was a kid, so I can’t blame my affliction on a hard hit on the field. In college I routinely pulled all-nighters to do what most of my friends did in an hour or two. I missed a lot of keggers which is probably why I was recruited by Miami. If I’d gone to half the parties I was invited to, chances are I’d be sitting in jail…or lying in a morgue.
Kitty Cat said I over-edited. Who knew that was a thing? Something else for me to Google, I guess. Not tonight, though. Everything reads like hieroglyphics.
The revolving door spins and deposits a couple into the parking lot. I hold my breath, but no one else comes out. I tell myself I only care for Catarina’s sake, but I’m pissed about North’s horrible timing as much as I am my own.
Why did I kiss her?
Simple. I was towed in by caramel-colored eyes, and the pink tongue wetting her lips. By that soft-as-sin hair and the way she shushed me as she read my column. The way she let me in and offered me a beer. The way she hung up on North and smiled at me, so damn proud of herself.
I didn’t plan on the kiss as a way of staking territory or getting her into bed. I was dragged in by every elemental, beautiful nuance about her.
And then her dickhead ex stormed in behaving like...well, like me.
I did that once when Beth and I were “on a break.” She’d been ignoring my messages and I knew she had a late test. Before I knew it, I was standing in the doorway of her college dorm room. She was in there with a guy from her psychology class. His shirt was too rumpled for my taste, so I balled my fists into his rumpled shirt and shoved him into the hallway so hard he fell on his ass. Then I decided Beth and I weren’t on a break and doled out a punishing kiss. Sex followed because that was how we solved problems.
I bob my foot impatiently as the door circles again. This time a man exits...who isn’t North.
Fuck.
Several weeks’ dry spell plus a vulnerable Catarina, plus her territorial ex doesn’t add up to a patient Barrett Fox. Are they in there right now, working things out the way Beth and I used to?
I can either sit here until he exits an hour from now, with his shirt untucked and his hair crimped in the pattern of her fingers, or I can put myself out of my misery and go home. I have no claim over Catarina. The kiss I gave her barely qualified as a kiss.
But dammit.
It was a good one.
Chapter 13