by Jae
Raindrops started to form patterns on the asphalt. “I’ll be fine. I’m parked right here.” After a quick wave at Carlos, she dashed toward her car and pressed the fob on her key. She dove behind the wheel and started the car while fishing for the seat belt with the other hand. For once, she couldn’t wait to get away from the club.
Luckily, their apartment was only a two-minute drive from The Fun Zone. As she turned left onto their street, she caught sight of a tall figure striding along the sidewalk, hands stuffed into their pockets and head lowered to avoid the rain. Steph didn’t need to see the person’s face to know it was Rae. She knew the way Rae moved by now, plus her don’t-talk-to-me vibes were palpable even from a distance.
For a second, Steph considered speeding past her without stopping. She wasn’t up for further discussions. But they shared an apartment, so she couldn’t escape Rae. She slowed the car to a near stop and lowered the driver’s side window. “Rae,” she shouted over the hum of the engine and the drumming of the rain.
Rae swiveled around, instantly on full alert.
“Just me,” Steph shouted. “Hop in. I’ll give you a ride home.”
Rae continued walking. “No, thanks.”
“Oh, come on. Don’t punish me by punishing yourself.”
Rae hesitated. After several seconds, she crossed the street and folded her tall frame into the passenger seat without saying a word.
Once Rae was settled, Steph guided the convertible down the long street. Since there was barely any traffic, she could take her eyes off the road to glance at Rae.
Rae had taken off her soaked-through suit jacket before getting into the car, probably so she wouldn’t get the seat wet. Her shirt had become damp too and was clinging to her chest and powerful shoulders.
Stop ogling. You’re fighting, remember? Steph redirected her attention to the street. Should she say something, explain why she had made their roommate arrangement part of her routine? Or was it better to wait until they were no longer trapped in the car together?
Before she could decide, they reached their apartment building.
Rae jumped out to open the gate—or maybe to escape her.
By the time Steph had parked the car in its assigned spot and walked around the building toward the front door, she was sure Rae had long since disappeared into her room.
But Rae was waiting outside, one foot in the front door to hold it open.
To protect and to serve. Apparently, Rae could never forget the motto of her former job. She wouldn’t leave Steph behind on her own in the darkness, even when she was angry with her. Now Steph was glad she had stopped for Rae instead of letting her walk home in the rain.
They trudged up the stairs in silence, the tension between them rising with every step.
As soon as the door closed behind them, they swiveled and faced each other like two boxers hearing the bell at the beginning of a round.
Not good. This was way too confrontational. To break their adversarial stance, Steph walked to the kitchen to make some coffee. She wouldn’t be sleeping tonight anyway. “Want some coffee?”
“I’d prefer an apology.” Rae’s tone was as cold and cutting as a steel blade.
Steph turned toward her.
Rae’s wet hair, which now looked black, stuck to her skull. When she swiped a damp strand away from her forehead with an impatient motion, a bit of hair flopped to the other side, revealing a spot on her scalp where no hair grew.
It distracted Steph for a moment, and that annoyed her even more. “I won’t apologize for doing my job. This is what I do, Rae. I use stuff from my life in my routine. If I didn’t, I would end up with a string of generic jokes that are about as interesting as watching the home shopping channel.”
Rae stormed past her, jerked the fridge open, and pulled out a bottle of water as if she needed it to cool down. “That’s bullshit. You had a comedy routine long before you moved in with me. You don’t need to humiliate me for other people’s amusement.”
“Humiliate?” Steph took a mug from the cupboard and slammed it down on the counter with a clunk. “Now you’re exaggerating. I poked fun at myself more than I talked about you.”
“I don’t want you to poke fun at me at all,” Rae shot back.
“I didn’t. Not really. None of my jokes were really about you. It was just a hook so I could talk about the humorous situations that happen when a slob like me lives with someone who’s more of a neat freak. Can’t you see the humor in that?”
A growl rose from Rae’s chest. “You called me a freak on stage?” She slammed the fridge door shut, whirled around, and took a step in Steph’s direction before she was even fully facing her.
Thump!
She crashed into the cupboard door Steph had left open. The edge of the door caught her left temple and sent her sprawling onto the floor, where she sat with a stunned expression.
“Oh God, Rae!” Adrenaline zipped through Steph like an electric shock. “I’m so sorry. Did you hurt yourself?” She dropped to her knees next to her.
“I’m fine,” Rae said, but she looked pretty dazed.
When she tried to get up, Steph put her hands on her shoulders. “Stay down. You might have a concussion.”
Rae started to shake her head but then winced. “I had a concussion a couple of years ago. This is just a little bump.” Despite her protests, she stayed put as Steph leaned closer to examine her.
“Let me see.” Steph gently took hold of Rae’s chin and turned her head so she could see. The skin wasn’t broken, so there was no blood, but an area on the left side of her forehead was starting to swell. Steph winced in sympathy and barely resisted the urge to stroke Rae’s cheek to soothe away the pain. She doubted Rae would appreciate that. “Shit. You’re starting to get a goose egg. We need to put some ice on it. Wait here.”
Rae grumbled but didn’t try to get up as Steph went to the freezer. She couldn’t find any ice, so she grabbed the first halfway suitable item she encountered.
“Raspberries?” Rae raised her brows, then flinched, probably as the movement tugged on the skin of her forehead.
“They’re good for your health.” Steph wrapped the frozen berries into a dish towel, knelt again, and gently held them to Rae’s forehead.
Rae brushed away Steph’s hands and took over applying the improvised cold pack. “Shit. I told you a thousand times not to leave the damn cupboard open.”
“I’m really sorry, Rae. But how on earth did you manage to not see it? It was right there.”
Rae gave her a dark glare. “Yeah, right there—for someone with two functioning eyes.”
They stared at each other. Rae looked as stunned by what she had just revealed as Steph felt.
“You mean you…you don’t see very well in one eye?”
“I don’t see anything at all on this side.” Rae tapped her left eye. It sounded as if she had rapped her fingernails against the hard surface of the kitchen counter.
A spiraling sensation spread through Steph’s stomach. She gulped heavily. “Oh my God! You have a glass eye? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Rae snorted. “Why would I? So you can use it in your routine too?”
The impact of Rae’s words hit Steph like a slap. She fell back onto her ass on the floor. “Jesus, Rae. Do you really think that little of me?”
“How would I know?” Rae mumbled. “Everything seems to be a joke to you, so why would this be off limits?”
Steph’s eyes started to burn. Oh, come on. She had heard it all before, even from her own sister, and she had always shrugged it off. This shouldn’t be any different, but somehow it was. “I would never…”
Rae waved her away. “Yeah, yeah.” With one hand still holding the raspberries to her head, she climbed to her feet.
Steph stayed seated on the floor for several moments longer. She felt da
zed, as if she had been the one who’d been hit in the head. When Rae moved past her toward her room, Steph quickly jumped up. “Rae, wait!”
Her shoulders so tense as if she were bracing for an attack, Rae turned around.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to take you to get checked out?” Steph gestured at the goose egg on Rae’s forehead.
“I’m sure.” The door clicked shut behind Rae but then opened again not even two seconds later.
Steph looked up with a hopeful gaze as Rae returned to the kitchen. Was Rae ready to talk? Not that Steph knew what to say. The revelation about Rae’s eye had caught her off guard.
But Rae only walked up to the plastic water bottle she’d dropped earlier.
Before she could bend to pick it up, Steph quickly did it for her.
“Thanks.” Without another word, Rae marched back to her room. This time, the door remained shut.
It was three o’clock in the morning, but Steph was wide-awake and pacing around her room. A thousand different thoughts seemed to be bouncing around in her head, keeping her up.
She closed her left eye and tried to imagine what life with one eye might be like. The dresser and the bookcase disappeared from her field of vision.
Now a lot of things she hadn’t understood about Rae suddenly made sense: why she sometimes startled when Steph stepped up to her from the left, why she always did a little dance to keep Steph on her right, and why she had seemingly ignored her the day Steph had watched her tossing a tennis ball.
It hurt to think that she might never find out how Rae experienced the world because Rae would refuse to ever talk to her about anything even halfway private again. Was Rae overreacting, or had Steph really crossed a line during tonight’s show?
She hadn’t thought so at the time, but maybe she needed to take a look at the recording to make sure.
Gabe had recorded her performance for her, but he probably wouldn’t upload the video to her YouTube channel before tomorrow. That was why she had recorded the audio so she could go over the set before heading to bed. She crossed the room and dug through her jacket pockets to retrieve her phone. When she couldn’t find it, she checked the kitchen and the hall.
Nothing.
She tried to remember when she’d last seen her phone. Shit. She had placed it on the stool up on stage to record her set but couldn’t remember handling it afterward. In the excitement of the show and then the chaos following it, she must have forgotten it at the club and could only hope that someone from the staff had found it and locked it up securely until she could get it.
Steph flopped down on her bed and stared up at the ceiling. Great. What a shitty end to a shitty evening!
CHAPTER 11
When Steph’s alarm went off, she let out a groan. She couldn’t have slept more than a couple of hours and would have given a kidney to be able to stay in bed. Should she call in sick? The thought was tempting, but she had her first dog-walking appointment of the day at nine and she had promised Penny she wouldn’t leave her in the lurch again.
She wouldn’t be able to call Penny anyway, since she had left her phone at the club.
Wait a minute! If her phone was at the club, how could the alarm on her cell have woken her up?
She swung her legs out of bed and padded through the apartment, following the sound of her alarm that was still going off.
It was coming from the kitchen, where she found the phone sitting on the breakfast bar.
Steph picked it up, turned off the alarm, and stared at the cell. Had she taken it home after all? No. She had checked the kitchen last night, and the phone hadn’t been there.
Rae. She must have found it on stage after the show and had probably forgotten to give it back to Steph once they had started arguing. Or had she purposefully kept it because she was angry with her?
No, that wasn’t Rae’s style.
Steph checked the counter and the breakfast bar. No note from Rae. The door to her room was open, revealing that her bed was made and Rae gone. Her running shoes were missing from the hall. Had she really gone on a run the morning after taking quite the bump to the head?
The thought made Steph’s stomach churn. But even if she had known Rae’s preferred jogging route, she had no time to check up on her. It would probably make Rae even angrier anyway.
Steph buried her fingers in her tousled hair. God, when had her life become so complicated? She had always thought she could avoid emotional convolutions if she stayed out of relationships, but apparently, moving in with a woman just as roommates was enough to complicate things.
Rae went all out, racing to beat her own personal record as she hurtled down the hilly path. She had discovered Pan Pacific Park the week after moving in with Steph, and while the loop around the park wasn’t a real challenge for her, she still came here every now and then to hit the outdoor gym area.
It was peaceful here if she managed to come at the right time of day. In the center of the park, she couldn’t even hear the traffic sounds, and if not for a couple of palm trees, she could almost forget that she was in the middle of LA. Normally, she found the atmosphere soothing, but today, even the third loop didn’t help to clear her head, no matter how fast she ran. She slowed as she passed the baseball field and dodged a woman with a stroller.
The fitness equipment had been set up on top of a hill so Rae had a good view of most of the park as she settled down on the ab bench and started doing crunches. A stand of trees blocked her sight of the unheated pool, but she knew it was there and still felt its pull. She imagined gliding through the water, putting her face down, and forgetting everything around her—everything that had happened last night.
But the pool was closed in winter, so the illusion didn’t last. She wasn’t doing laps—hadn’t been for many months—and who knew when she would work up the courage to jump into a pool again? There was no medical reason she couldn’t; she knew that. With the exception of fast-paced ball games that required good depth perception, there wasn’t much she couldn’t do if she put her mind to it. But she wouldn’t be able to see if another swimmer crossed into her lane from the left. Worse, what if her prosthesis slipped out? Her ocularist assured her it wasn’t very likely, but she’d done some research on a forum for people who’d lost one eye, and it had happened to one or two of them. While her swimming goggles would contain the prosthesis, she wouldn’t be able to put it back in while in the pool. Her stomach churned at the thought of other people seeing her empty socket. Rae imagined them staring in horror—just as Steph had stared at her last night.
Her head started to pound at the memory of crashing into the cupboard door. Fuck, that had been so embarrassing, but even worse was that she had slipped up and told Steph about the eye. How the hell had that happened? She had never told anyone, not even by accident. Her boss knew, of course, but her colleagues had no clue, and she wanted to keep it that way.
Now that might not be an option.
She lay back onto the bench and stared up into the hazy sky.
Despite what she had said in anger last night, she didn’t really believe that Steph would make up a comedy routine about her one-eyed roommate. But if Steph told her friend Gabe, it wouldn’t be long before all the comedians knew, and then it was only a matter of time before the club staff would hear about it. Would her colleagues still trust her to have their backs once they knew she was blind in one eye?
Something cold and wet touched the bare bend of her elbow, nearly making her fall off the bench. She swiveled her head around.
A massive dog loomed in front of her, sniffing up her arm. With its shaggy fur and large head, it looked more like a bear than a canine.
Oh shit. Rae went very still. Who the hell had let that monster off its leash?
The cold, black nose wandered up her arm. Luckily, the dog’s body language didn’t seem threatening, just curious.
; “Hi there,” Rae said, keeping her tone friendly and soothing.
The dog stopped its sniffing, tilted its massive head to one side, and studied her. It didn’t look as if it were scouting out its next meal.
Just as Rae prepared to carefully sit up, the dog enthusiastically licked her cheek.
“Ugh.” Rae quickly sat up and buried her hands in the dog’s thick fur to push it back. “Shouldn’t you buy me dinner first?”
The dog pushed forward, into her hands, urging her to pet it.
Rae obliged. Wow, its fur was incredibly thick and soft, even though it was on the short side. She scratched behind its floppy ears, and for the first time all day, a smile curved her lips as petting the dog did what even her workout hadn’t managed to do: finally relaxing her a little. “You’re a big cuddle bug, aren’t you?”
The dog let out a contented groan.
Rae looked around for its owner. Someone had to miss this teddy bear of a dog.
Running steps approached from around a bend of the path. “Moose!” an out-of-breath woman called.
The dog’s floppy ears perked up.
“Moose, huh?” Rae said. Somehow, it fit the big dog. “I think that’s you.”
A slender woman barreled around the corner, her blonde hair flying around her head in wild waves. A cloud of sand dust rose up as she skidded to a stop in front of Rae.
Rae’s gaze slid up a pair of killer legs in tight jeans, wandered over full breasts revealed by a formfitting V-neck shirt and an open leather jacket—and then froze on the woman’s face. “Steph?”
“Rae?”
“What are you doing here?” they said in unison.
Steph couldn’t believe it. Of all the people in the park, Moose had escaped to her roommate! Her very sweaty, very sexy, and probably still very angry roommate, who would get even angrier if she noticed Steph ogling the nice curve of her biceps and the way her damp shirt clung to her breasts and shoulders. It took some effort to tear her gaze away.
“I’m working out,” Rae said.