by Ava Lore
“I really am sorry,” he murmured after a long while, and his voice poured over me like honey.
I pretended to be asleep, and, some time afterwards, my pretense became reality.
*
“Mr. Colton!”
I snapped awake, disoriented.
The world was dark and hot, and I was sweating like a stuck pig. I was lying on something lumpy and...moving.
The night came flooding back to me and I shot bolt upright, then immediately wished I hadn’t. The coat that had kept us warm fell away, and icy air invaded. I started shivering and grabbed the coat again, hunkering down against Damien’s chest and holding the wool over us.
The sky was still dark, but the dim gray light of the rising sun was starting to encroach on the blackness. There were also a bunch of people standing around, looking down at us, none of whom I recognized.
One of them was a woman with short dark hair, an exquisitely expensive coat, and a half-worried, half-exasperated look on her face. She was staring down her nose at me with a hard, assessing gaze, and it didn’t take much intuition to know she was quietly judging me.
I colored and groped for words but all I could think was: I hope my pantyhose aren’t ripped to shreds when I stand up.
“Lina.” Damien’s voice rumbled against my ear, and despite how he’d withdrawn from me last night, the sound still sent little trickles of molten desire down my spine. “How’d you find us up here?”
The dark-haired woman’s eyes, still studying me critically, narrowed. “We almost didn’t,” she snapped. “Someone called the hotel to ask if one of the maids had left. She was missing.”
Dwayne, I thought. Good old Dwayne. I knew I could count on him.
Lina continued. “They pulled up the security cameras and there you were, going up to the roof with her and not coming back down. Come on.” She cast a brief, critical glance over him. “Let’s get you to the hospital.”
“I don’t think I need to go to the hospital,” Damien said.
“Shut up,” Lina told him. Her eyes returned to me. “And get off him. The door’s unlocked, you can go home now.”
My blush deepened and I scrambled to get off Damien’s lap. Mortified, I turned away and pulled my hood over my head, then checked my purse to make sure I had everything I’d need before fleeing the country in humiliation. No passport, but that was okay. I was planning on jumping into the bay and swimming to Spain.
“Hey,” I heard Damien say. “Don’t talk to her like that. This is an old friend of mine. I knew her back in high school.”
“Okay. That’s great. Let’s go,” Lina replied, clearly not impressed. A man who had been hovering behind her shot me an apologetic smile, but I couldn’t muster one in return, so I just ducked my head and tried to stuff my hair back up under my hood.
“Just a minute.”
I was only half-listening to Damien and Lina. I was now thinking that this had to be the most awkward morning-after in the history of morning-afters, and my mind was preoccupied with ways to escape it. But then I saw Damien step up to me and his hand touched my elbow.
Plastering a smile on my face I turned to him. “Yes?” I said.
He looked pained. “I...” he started, and for a moment I thought he was going to say something about catching up later, or how much he secretly loved me, or propose marriage, or something. But then he shook his head. “It was nice to catch up with you,” was all he said.
Yeah.
Stung, I swallowed the sudden lump in my throat. “Same. Thanks for helping me survive the night.”
“Same.”
We stared at each other for one long awkward moment. I waited for him to give me his phone number, or to ask for mine, or something. Anything. But he just watched me, deep in thought.
I coughed and gave a little laugh. “So maybe someday soon I’ll come to one of your shows. I’ll wait backstage and be one of your groupies and everything,” I said.
I’d meant it as a joke, but instead his eyes widened, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn that he was almost...scared. His face seemed to grow pale, and he was silent for a long moment. But what was he scared of? That I’d lame up his gig? Embarrass him somehow?
“No,” he said finally. “Don’t do that. You wouldn’t belong there.”
Oh.
There it was. Rejection. Right there. Just like I’d always knew would happen.
It took me a second to get my voice under control, but I was very proud of myself when I finally did. “Oh,” I said. “Okay. Thanks for sharing your coat.”
“Cassie. Lauren...”
But I was backing off, my head down. Then I turned and walked away, around the wall to the door and down the stairs.
He called after me, but I pretended not to hear him.
It was fine. It was all fine. I’d had some fun, finally kissed Dalton Rooker, finally got fingered by Damien Colton, and really, wasn’t that all a girl really needed in life?
But I’d wanted more. Deep down inside, I was still that naïve high school student who dreamed big, and when her dreams were too big for her to hold on to they slipped through her fingers and she crashed and burned.
That’s okay, I told myself. At least you’re used to it now.
I went home to my soft, disappointing world, where I belonged, and refused to cry.
Chapter Six
“You’re boring,” Dwayne told me four days later. “This is boring. You bore me.”
“How can you be bored?” I asked him, peeking out from beneath the blanket I’d put over my head. “That’s not like you at all. Besides, didn’t you tell me only boring people get bored?”
He had, and it was true. Dwayne was one of the few people in the world who was never bored because everything was either an opportunity to learn something new, or an opportunity to ruthlessly fuck with people. He loved to do both, and I wasn’t convinced that my semi-permanent residence on his couch had changed that fundamental fact.
“Fine,” he said. “You aren’t boring me. You’re destroying the ambience of the apartment. You’re depressing.”
“Maybe that’s because I am depressed,” I said, feeling cranky. “Thanks for asking, by the way.”
“I know you’re depressed but you don’t have to go spreading it around like herpes.” He glared at me and waved his hands, as though pointing out the sores from the mopey STD I’d given his apartment.
I glared right back up at him. “Can’t you just let me wallow in peace?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Wallowing doesn’t do you any good. I should know. I wallow in a lot of things. None of them are healthy and sometimes you have to take a shower afterwards.” Heaving a put-upon sigh, he turned away from me and headed for the kitchen where more beer awaited him. Tipsily I watched him retreat.
It was now six or so in the evening and we’d been drinking since about ten in the morning. Dwayne had decided to “work from home” today because it was RPG night and he wanted to get everything in order before the nerds showed up. Dwayne, a six-foot three-inch impeccably dressed black man who worked in finance, was not the sort of person I would have pegged as a tabletop gaming fan, but, without fail, every Wednesday he had a whole slew of people over to his apartment. He would wear a ridiculous fedora and put on glasses with plain glass lenses, to “fit in” he claimed. He fit in like my ass “fit in” to pencil skirts—badly, but with a certain perilous charm.
RPG night was how I’d met him, actually, the very first week I’d moved into my apartment. He lived directly below me in our cramped brownstone and he and the nerds had been drunk and arguing about the finer points of elven and dwarven relations. Or something like that—no matter how closely I pay attention I can’t seem to get the hang of imaginary politics. Regardless, they had been so loud that I’d had to roll out of bed, put on clothes, and stomp downstairs to yell at them.
Dwayne had answered the door, dapper as fuck in his stylish work clothes and unironic fedora, looked me
up and down, and then invited me in for cocktails. “Cocktails” turned out to be Red Bull and vodka, and I was invited to observe the game so that I could see how unfair it was for me to ask them to be quiet. So I did. That night instead of sleeping I’d actually had fun, and Dwayne later told me he wanted me to stick around because I had at least entered the 3 AM game session with an open mind.
We’d been friends ever since, though I’m not sure what Dwayne gets out of our relationship besides maybe a reminder not to suck at life. I stick around because he’s easy on the eyes, has sworn to teach me the arcane secrets of twenty-sided dice, and occasionally likes to feed me alcohol and sushi.
For the first time, however, I wasn’t looking forward to game night. Actually at this point every spare moment I hadn’t spent at work had been spent lying on Dwayne’s couch and tending to the very intense and busy job of feeling sorry for myself. And why shouldn’t I? I’d had the man of my dreams in my arms. The man of my dreams had confessed that he liked me and was interested in me—that he had been infatuated with me for years—and yet somehow, some way, I’d managed to fuck it up.
“I didn’t even get laid,” I’d say out loud periodically, regardless of whether or not someone was in the room. Now, wounded by Dwayne’s lack of sympathy, I felt this was as good a time as any to remind the universe of this intrinsically tragic state of affairs.
“I didn’t even get laid,” I told Dwayne.
“Yes, thank you, you’ve said that.” He stood at the counter, pouring some kind of super expensive microbrew into a tall glass. “But, and I say this with utmost love, who cares?”
“Me?” I hazarded.
“Exactly,” he said. “You. No one else cares. You have to pull it together, Cassie. This is getting sad.”
I pouted miserably. “I thought we were friends.”
“We are friends. I will, until my dying breath, swear up and down that you deserved to get laid by that Dorian guy—”
“Damien.”
“Like it matters. You deserved to get laid by that Damien guy but he didn’t know what a good thing he had in front of him so he let you slip through his fingers.”
“Threw me away like trash,” I said.
“Released you like a beautiful butterfly,” Dwayne countered. “But I am your friend, and I have to be real with you. You are overreacting.” He took a long swig of beer. “Nut up,” he added.
He was right, of course. With a sigh I slowly sat up and rubbed my face. I wasn’t wearing any makeup and my hair was a mess. The couch was just a smidgen too short for me, so I tossed and turned in my sleep every night, leaving it gloriously mussed in the morning. It might have been beautiful post-sex hair, except I wouldn’t know what that looked like. Because I hadn’t had sex. And now maybe I never would. Because Damien was a jerk, and I hated him and now, if I ran into him and he asked me which direction he needed to go to pull his head out of his ass, I wouldn’t even tell him where he could buy a map.
I still wanted to bone him, though. I mean, I’m not stupid.
I stared at the carpet in front of me and tried to get my thoughts in order. Why was I so upset about this? Sex was sex. It would happen. I’d even find a guy who might actually like me to do it with.
I had still, however, failed to seduce a man with a hard-on.
The realization was demoralizing. In addition to failing in nearly every aspect of my life, including academically, professionally, financially and personally, I’d also failed at even the most basic task of getting a guy to sleep with me. I mean, seriously, isn’t that supposed to be easy for girls? Guys are always trying to sleep with you. Getting laid should have been as easy as falling down a flight of stairs.
Figures I’d suck at even that.
Groaning, I hauled myself to my feet, staggered a bit beneath the influence of one too many beers, and began to gather my things, which were strewn in a very neat heap at the foot of the sofa. Dwayne watched me from the kitchen.
“Go get a shower, Cassie,” he said. “In your own apartment. You’ll feel better. Then you can come back for game night.”
“’kay,” I muttered. Arms full of dirty laundry, I let myself out of his apartment and climbed the stairs up to mine. Opening the door I stumbled inside and dumped my clothes in the middle of the living room.
Hey, it’s not like I was gonna have a guy over anytime soon, right?
Stumbling a bit, I procured a glass of water from the kitchen, drank it all down, and migrated to my own couch. It was almost as comfortable as Dwayne’s, and when I sat down I was suddenly overtaken with the need to sleep. Just...sleep. And forget.
*
I slept for three minutes and was awoken by the sound of nuclear bombs falling on the city.
SKKKRRREEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAEEEEEE—!
“Holy shit!” Straight from dreamland, do not pass Go, I jumped to my feet at the terrible, booming, high-pitched grinding noise that was surely Manhattan going up in a mushroom cloud. My heart hammered in my throat and I looked wildly about my apartment.
Any second now all the pictures are going to fall off the wall and then I’ll be vaporized, oh my god—
“Testing? Testing? Can you hear me, Cassie?”
At first the words, delivered over a loudspeaker, didn’t even register with me. I was too busy waiting to be zapped into my component molecules.
When that failed to happen, I blinked and rubbed my hand over my eyes.
What?
“Cassie? Oh, Caaaaaaassssiiiiieeeeee...”
I knew that voice. I’d know that voice anywhere. The only question was, why was that voice here, and why did it appear to be coming from outside my apartment window?
These are questions to which a girl needs to know the answers.
I didn’t try to fool myself into believing I was still asleep. My life had been too topsy turvy in the past five days for me to question that this was, indeed, reality. Instead I staggered over to the window and peered down into the street.
There, on the sidewalk in front of my walk-up in a crustier part of town, was Damien Colton with a guitar, a microphone, and an amplifier. The world-ending noise had merely been feedback.
Dazed, I opened the window and leaned out.
“Oh!” Damien said, spotting me. “There you are, Cassie.” He held the microphone to his mouth, even though amplification wasn’t necessary between the ground and the second floor. His voice was booming out over the neighborhood. I was probably about to become very unpopular.
I tried to line my thoughts up into something resembling order.
“Damien,” I said finally. “What are you doing here?”
He grinned up at me, and it was somehow both wicked and wholesome. His green eyes twinkled even at this distance. “Isn’t it obvious?” he said. “I’ve come to woo my Juliet.”
“Juliet died,” was all I could think to say.
Maybe it really was all my fault. I didn’t seem to have a romantic bone in my body.
My pedantry did not seem to faze Damien in the least. “Rest assured,” he said, “I am not angling for a suicide pact.”
I thought about this. “Are you drunk?”
“Nope.” He said it proudly, as if that somehow made this better.
“Well, I need to be,” I told him. “Why don’t you come up?”
His face fell. “But how am I supposed to apologize to you without a balcony serenade?”
I tried not to roll my eyes. “You could come up here and say you’re sorry,” I told him. “I mean, that’s just a suggestion. But it’s, you know...it’s a good one.”
“No way,” he said. “I need to sing a song to you.”
Oh my god. He just wasn’t going to let this drop, was he? Other windows were opening now, and people were coming out of their own buildings to see what the ruckus was.
I’ll admit, part of me was completely charmed. But it was a small part. The much larger part of me was worried that Damien was going to get arrested. “How long is the song?”<
br />
“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t written it yet. I was going to gaze upon your visage and let your loveliness inspire me.”
I stared at him some more. “Okay, forget drunk. Are you high?”
He coughed. “Not at the moment.”
I scowled.
He coughed again. “I mean, a few well-placed tokes may have contributed to this idea, but I still think it’s a pretty good one now that I’m sober.”
I was honestly torn. On the one hand, I wanted to be serenaded by one of the most desirable and talented men in the world. I wanted everyone to know that he wanted me.
On the other hand...
Well, okay. I really couldn’t think of a reason for him to not serenade me. Just a little one. Really quick-like.
“If you promise to make it short,” I said, “then go ahead.” More people were gathering, and now I could tell some of them had recognized Damien, because cell phones were coming out and video was being recorded, and the vague buzz of people talking was rising higher. Damien didn’t seem to notice any of that, though.
He only had eyes for me.
He grinned up at me. “For you, Cassandra Lauren,” he said. He slotted the microphone into its stand and began to strum.
I closed my eyes and listened. Notes cascaded past me, through me, dipping and diving. I couldn’t help but gasp with each peak and sigh with each valley. Damien had magical fingers, whether they were on my breasts or on a guitar, and I wanted nothing more than to give myself over to his music.
Eyes shut, I swayed in the window, waiting for his serenade to begin.
After about five minutes I opened my eyes and looked down at him. He seemed perplexed and not a little embarrassed.
“I thought there would be words,” I shouted.
The strumming faded away. “Yeah,” he said. “I kind of thought there would be. Maybe I should have written some down.”
From below me came Dwayne’s distinctive voice. “Loser!” he yelled through his window, and Damien blushed bright red.