There wasn’t any noise from Sabrina’s room. The puzzle she’d been working on with Ryder a few days ago was still on the table. Sometimes she sat there and found a few more pieces while picking apart her food and taunting me with her lips, teeth, and tongue.
I slammed my bedroom door and stared at my bed, trying not to feel the deep sense of betrayal that I couldn’t lay in there without waking up in an overheated sweat, like I’d been running a marathon in my sleep. I turned on the music, cranking it up to just below floor rumbling. The soundproofing made it possible. Millie wouldn’t be disturbed, and the apartment below mine was empty except for a few weeks in winter every year.
I’d be over this by then, or they’d be woken by my screams in the dead of night. Their choice.
In the bathroom I sat on the bench beside the tub. The sweet, calming smell filled my nose, and I dropped my head back, leaning against the wall. My eyes drifted closed. I just needed a few minutes here before I tried to get some sleep. A quiet settled over me. One without the beeping monitors, medical detergent, and smell of saline that had turned every dream into a nightmare for the past three months.
I breathed deeply and let myself drift off. Only for a few minutes, and didn’t try to think too hard about why I wanted to crawl into bed with Sabrina and why I thought it would make any of this easier.
It wouldn’t, and I’d learned that a long time ago.
12
Sabrina
The apartment was quiet and the smell of coffee lingered from the pot that had been warming since the early morning.
I didn’t mind hours-old coffee. I got my mug and refilled it until the pot was empty around noon. After starting a new pot, I took a sip and grimaced.
Hunter hadn’t been wrong. I sucked at making coffee. With my potently-caffeinated sludge, I went back to my room and hunkered down for a long haul of editing. The ache in my muscles intensified as the hours ticked by.
Sitting straight, I groaned and the muscles in my back ached. I slipped the headphones off and closed the video-editing program.
I needed to find a better desk. Once January got here and I hopefully got that big check, maybe I could. Blinking, I tried to banish the spots dancing in front of my eyes. That was it. Time to step away from the computer.
My neck cracked, and the muscles screamed for relief. The kind of relief I might get from a bath.
I’d tried to stick to our deal about respecting each other’s spaces, but he wasn’t here. At least I didn’t think he was.
Hunter had left while I was grabbing a midafternoon snack from the kitchen an hour ago. But my noise-cancelling headphones blocked out all background noise, which would’ve masked his return.
I peeked into the hallway. “Hunter? Are you here?”
Not a sound.
“Hunter? I’m thinking of inviting ten guys over for a gang-bang scene and shooting it in the living room. You cool with that?” I walked down the hallway, not keeping my steps light. Knocking on Hunter’s bedroom door, I turned the knob at the same time and poked my head inside. “Did you want to hold the mic?”
I looked around his room. His bed was made, no clothes on the floor, everything in its place.
One thing I’d say for living with Hunter, I never had to pick up after him. Dishes were washed, and laundry never sat in the washer or dryer, which was better than I ever pulled off. It was nothing like it had been living with Seth.
I’d taken care of everything. Laundry, cooking, cleaning. It probably had something to do with him having a whole other house to take care of. The pang hit my chest, but now it didn’t feel like a blistering iron pressed against my rib cage.
It hadn’t been my fault. And I’d left as soon as I found out. I wasn’t a bad person. I repeated the mantra and walked back to my room to grab my bath stuff. You never really knew who someone was. We were all wearing masks, and no one ever wanted to let theirs down.
My track record with relationships didn’t point at me being a good judge of character in the least bit. A string of failed ones, which ended with me getting my heart broken. How much of it had to do with my terrible instincts when it came to sizing people up?
Walking into Hunter’s bedroom, I had to admit, okay, maybe I was a little bit of a bad person for sneaking in, but he’d made my life stressful enough. I deserved at least a little relaxation. My toes sank into the carpet without a hint of a creak or groan.
This was probably the nicest place I’d ever live. Always cool and cozy, even when it had been blazing hot only a few weeks ago in August. Now, with things cooling down, my feet never got cold like they had in the old apartment.
On the way to the bathroom, I stopped short. On Hunter’s sleek wood nightstand with the stained-glass lamp beside it was The Prisoner of Azkaban. The dust jacket was off, but the gold lettering along the spine didn’t lie.
A Harry Potter fan? You didn’t start with Azkaban. How many almost-thirty-year-old guys picked it up for the first time? Scrutinizing his space with new eyes, I looked for clues.
He kept the place too neat.
I’d have to search the bookshelves for the rest of the books.
I braced for the cold tile feel in the bathroom out of habit, but the underfloor heating meant the transition from carpet to tile wasn’t the usual shock. I set my things on the counter.
My bath oil bottle rolled off the stack and fell into the bathroom trash can. I fished it out, but it didn’t come up alone. Stuck to the outside of the bottle was a wrapper. A Tastykakes butterscotch krimpet wrapper.
That snake.
Here I was feeling the slightest bit guilty about using his bath and he’d been stealing my food and maybe trying to gaslight me with “the big girl can’t remember how much she’s eating” while laughing his way into carb and sugar-loaded heaven.
My fingers curled around my bath oil bottle, and my gaze narrowed. Grumbling under my breath, I jerked my towel from the stack and set it on the towel warmer. Turning on the water, I swore retribution. I didn’t know how or when, but I would.
A few drops was all I needed for the bath, and the calming lavender scent derailed my thoughts of payback—at least for now. After getting undressed, I slipped into the warm water and rested my head against the back of the tub.
His confession in the dining room a few days ago had helped make sense of his intense dislike for Ryder. Dealing with his mom being so sick so quickly, his dad leaving, and finding out he had a whole new family couldn’t have been easy.
After what happened with Seth, I couldn’t imagine driving up to his house and staring his wife and kids in the eye. My stomach knotted into a bile-churning mess thinking about it. To be a teenager handling all that—adults couldn’t handle it.
But Ryder had nothing to do with his dad’s infidelity. And it didn’t seem like his mom was a peach either. He was searching for someone to connect to. Someone like his big brother, who couldn’t say more than a few growly words to him.
I closed my eyes and let the relaxation of the warm water wash away the knots and aches from a day hunched over my computer. I’d think of a way to solve the Ryder-Hunter problem, even if it was letting Ryder know he could come to me since his brother was determined to ignore him.
Forty minutes later I was sufficiently pruney, calm and clean. Pulling the plug from the tub, I hopped out onto the towel I’d set on the floor so I wouldn’t leave wet footprints on the bath mat.