I look over at Brian as he lifts his chin toward Calvin, and feel my cheeks heat. He’s staring straight ahead, jaw tight. We’ve knocked heads so many times and it all just feels pointless now.
“Are you seriously choosing this moment to rub my nose in it?”
He meets my eyes, and a weird discomfort works its way through me. I’ve never held eye contact with him for so long; I realize what strangers we are that I wouldn’t have been able to name his eye color until now. “I’m not making a dig,” he says quietly. “I’m sure it sucks that Robert is moving to L.A., and I’m sure it sucks to see Calvin with someone else.”
I stare at him, confused.
“You did something for the production—it was ungodly stupid, of course, but you did it for the right reasons.” His eyebrows pull down. “And now you’re here hurting. I’m just saying, human to human, I’m sorry.”
“Excuse me,” I mumble, turning because I’m worried I’m going to start crying. I push carefully through the crowd and find a side door into an empty hallway connecting the banquet rooms. The floor is marble; my heels click quickly down to the end, where I lean against a door to the stairwell, breathing in and out.
I want to escape to my apartment, but Davis has my coat check ticket, and Calvin is still holding my phone.
Back down the hall, the side door opens again. The sound of surprised voices and riotous applause spills out; I assume Robert has just mentioned L.A.
But the cacophony dims back to a lull when the door closes with a heavy click.
Footsteps approach, steady and measured, and a quiet Irish accent comes from behind me. “Holland.”
“Go back in there,” I tell him, working to sound steady. I don’t want to do this on a night that is supposed to be about Robert. “They aren’t done with the announcement yet.”
“They’ve just finished.” He pauses, and I hear his heavy exhale. “I saw you leave, and it’s just . . . I’m confused about what happened back there.”
Unable to face him yet, I swallow, trying to clear the thickness from my throat. “Which part?”
“The part where you saw me photographed with Natalie?” From behind me, his voice is gentle: “Did you look at it?”
What? “Of course I did. Obsessively.”
“Are you sure?”
Finally, I turn around, confused. His expression softens when he sees that I’m a crying mess, and he reaches up, carefully moving his thumb across my cheek.
“Look again.”
Sniffing, I do what he says, entering my passcode and looking at the photo I’ve already seen a hundred times now.
He bites his lip, waiting for me to understand before letting out a small laugh. “Natalie Nguyen.” Calvin taps the screen, and now his eyes are smiling. “You think I’m dating Natalie Nguyen?”
“Everyone thinks that. You . . . have been seen together a couple times and you have your arm around her.” I lick my lips, anxious that I’m missing something here. “That’s what Entertainment Weekly said.”
“I’ve seen her at a few theater events. This photo was at Ramón’s premiere, right?” I nod. He points to the edge of the photo, where I can now make out a sliver of a sleeve. “I think this photo cropped out Ramón so it looks like it’s just me and Natalie. Do you know how many photos I took that night?”
I wipe my nose. “No.”
“Probably five thousand.” He zooms in on the picture to an extreme close-up of his hand before giving it back to me. It’s my least favorite part of the photo—Calvin’s hand is wrapped fully around her waist—and it takes me a second to realize what he’s showing me: the glint of a ring on his finger.
My eyes fly down to his hand at his side, here in front of me. He’s still wearing it.
“Natalie Edgerton is a friend of Mark’s,” he explains, and my stomach drops out in realization. “He set us up months ago, but then I got married, and fell in love—admittedly in that order. I never replied to her text from that day, by the way.”
I groan into my hands. “Oh, my God.”
“Natalie Nguyen is an actress with a small role in Ramón’s film.” Calvin pries my hands away and holds them in his. “Even if I was at all interested in seeing other women—which I’m not—do you really think she’s the one who was calling an unemployed street musician for a date all those months ago?”
All motion has come to a halt in my brain. I want to throw myself against the wall repeatedly, until I’m unconscious and can forget this ever happened. “Maybe not.”
He reaches up with one hand to wipe beneath my eye. “I don’t have a girlfriend, Holland. I’ve got a wife, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“I know, but—”
“Though she hasn’t texted, hasn’t rung me back, and hasn’t wanted to see me.”
At his tone, I glance up to his face, for the first time hearing past my own anxiety and hurt. In the stark hallway light, he looks devastated.
“You told me you loved me,” he reminds me. “And I told you I’d wait. But it’s been painful wondering more and more frequently whether you’ll ever ask me to come home.” He ducks a little to hold my gaze. “We were going to have dinner, and you canceled last minute.”
“I was working on myself, and getting past Amanda, and all of the uncertainty that started building between us,” I admit. “And when I thought I was ready to see you . . . I saw the photo.”
“So why not call?” he asks. “Just to ask me about it? Or yell at me? Anything. If I did have a girlfriend that would still be something to discuss, logistically, given that we’re married, wouldn’t it?”
I press my hands to my face, mumbling, “I don’t know” from behind them.
Calvin gently pries my hands away again. “If I went off with someone else, wouldn’t you be angry?”
“Yes. Furious.”
“As would I. I would be homicidal if you were with another bloke. So why not let me have it? I could have saved you so many days of worrying about this.”
I look up at him. “I wasn’t actually sure a conversation about it would go that way.”
“You mean, you weren’t sure I still loved you after only two months apart? What kind of heart do you think lives inside here?” He presses our joined hands to his chest. “I miss you.”
It feels like a fist curls around my lungs when he says this in present tense. “It made more sense in some ways to think you were playing along.”
“That I—?” He blinks away, scowling. “Did you not read your own essay? You act as though all this time you were simply going along with something. What you did for me was astounding, and who you are—calm, and assured, and sexy, and carefully creative . . . I am absolutely smashed in love with you.”
I bite my lower lip savagely, looking back and forth at his eyes, trying to find the act. He has no reason to lie anymore. His hands come up, framing my face, and my heart pushes painfully against my breastbone, clawing toward him.
A breath away from me, and his eyes are still open. “So? Can I kiss my bride?”
A hallway kiss turns into a full-on hallway makeout session, and I consider it a small miracle that no one finds us out here, with me pressed to the wall, one leg around Calvin’s hips. In his touch, I can tell that he was telling the truth about our time apart being painful: against me, he’s shaking, nearly frantic.
We go back into the party hand in hand. He gets me a wine, gets himself a beer, and we dance, pressed so close together I can feel what it does to him. When he apologizes with a quiet laugh, I look up, and we grin in unison at the shared, unspoken promise of the insane sex we are going to have later tonight.
I’m hoping neither of us can walk straight tomorrow.
My thoughts clean up a little when I introduce Calvin to Davis. Jeff and I watch in awe as the two men seem to strike up an immediate bromance centered on home-brewed beer and rugby.
With the two of them bent together, frantically discussing the Milwaukee microbrewery scene, Jeff pulls me aside
, proudly spinning me around the room to some Sinatra.
Calvin breaks in a few minutes later, smiling in thanks to Jeff and pulling me close again.
“You disappeared.”
“You and Davis were lost to beer. I was standing nearby like a floor lamp.”
He laughs, pressing his lips to my jaw. When my hands slip up the back of his neck and into his hair, he groans quietly. “You feel so good against me. I’m so relieved, I could fall over.”
“I think one more hour, then we can justify leaving.”
He smiles down at me. “I took the liberty of telling Davis he was staying at the uncles’ tonight.”
I close my eyes and imagine being alone with him later, undressing him and kissing every bit of smooth, exposed skin. I imagine the feel of the mattress at my back, the view of him falling over me, moving down my body, mouth open and wet.
I can practically feel the electricity of his first kiss between my legs, the clamp of his hands around my thighs, and the weight of him when he moves back up over me.
“What are you thinking about?” His lips move against my earlobe.
“Being home with you later.”
“You’re thinking about fucking me right now?”
I look up at him, with a joke on the tip of my tongue, but it dissolves away at the fever in his gaze. “Yeah.” I stretch, kissing him in a slow slide of my mouth over his. “Specifically about your mouth and how it feels to have you on top of me.”
“You’re not sleeping,” he warns, and I laugh until a wave of relief hits me, so enormous that I wrap my arms around his neck, pressing my cheek to his.
When the song ends, he leads me back over to my brother and the bar. I know people are watching us, but I no longer feel like they’re wondering what Calvin is doing with me. With his octopus hands all over me, and the way Davis is making us both double over in laughter, I feel for the first time like our love looks as easy and genuine from the outside as it feels from the inside.
In tiny stolen moments, my husband pulls me into dark corners for a kiss, or down onto his lap on a couch. Between sips of our drinks and conversation with people around us, we volley a hundred questions back and forth.
Should we have another wedding? A real one?
When should we go visit my family?
Are we both moving temporarily to L.A.?
And most important: I won the meat bet, so . . . when is he officially taking my last name?
We can debate that one for a while. Thankfully, we’re not cramming to convince anyone else anymore. We have time.
acknowledgments
After our beloved feminist manifesto-romp of Dating You / Hating You, and the tender heartswell of Autoboyography, writing Roomies was pure, shameless fun. Holland and Calvin’s story was a much enjoyed return to our romance roots, and we love nothing more than a story set in NYC!
So thank you, Adam Wilson, for saying yes when a new story idea rolls out of our collective imagination, and for always helping us turn the first draft of madness into an actual book. Our agent, Holly Root, is a star, and without her we would be blind (and contractless). To our ever-supportive publisher, thank you: Carolyn Reidy, Louise Burke (happy retirement!), Jen Bergstrom, and Paul O’Halloran, and the hardest-working sales team in publishing. Publicity badass report: Kristin “Precious” Dwyer is the calm to our crazy, the Nutella to our waffle, the punctuation to our sentence; and Teresa Dooley is the kind of stellar-on-the-ball that things are done before we even think to ask about them. Thank you, too, to the Gallery marketing group: Liz Psaltis, Diana Velasquez, Abby Zidle, and Mackenzie Hickey. Our covers are always phenomenal—thank you, Lisa and John of the Mustache.
Our prereader editorial lifesavers are Erin Service and Marion Archer. Without you, this book would still not have an ending. Thanks, as ever, for the honest critique and constant support! Thank you, Blane Mall for Irish’ing up our Irishman, and to Jonathan Root for help with the Broadway details; any mistakes are ours alone.
And to all of our readers out there, thank you for coming along for each one of these adventures. We love you all more than we can possibly say.
xoxo
Christina & Lo
about the author
© ALYSSA MICHELLE 2013
CHRISTINA LAUREN is the combined pen name of longtime writing partners/besties/soulmates and brain-twins Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, the New York Times, USA Today, and #1 international bestselling authors of the Beautiful and the Wild Seasons series, Dating You / Hating You, Sublime, The House, and Autoboyography.
You can find them online at christinalaurenbooks.com, Facebook.com/ChristinaLaurenBooks, or @ChristinaLauren on Twitter.
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR:
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Christina-Lauren
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
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BOOKS BY CHRISTINA LAUREN
Dating You / Hating You
Roomies
Love and Other Words
The Beautiful Series
Beautiful Bastard
Beautiful Stranger
Beautiful Bitch
Beautiful Bombshell
Beautiful Player
Beautiful Beginning
Beautiful Beloved
Beautiful Secret
Beautiful Boss
Beautiful
Wild Seasons
Sweet Filthy Boy
Dirty Rowdy Thing
Dark Wild Night
Wicked Sexy Liar
Young Adult
Sublime
The House
Autoboyography
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Gallery Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Gallery Books trade paperback edition December 2017
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Interior design by Bryden Spevak
Wedding Rings © Matthias Kulka/Getty Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lauren, Christina, author.
Title: Roomies / Christina Lauren.
Description: First Gallery Books trade paperback edition. | New York :
Gallery Books, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017036788 (print) | LCCN 2017040452 (ebook) | ISBN
9781501165849 (ebook
) | ISBN 9781501165832 (softcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Marriage—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary
Women. |GSAFD: Love stories.
Classification: LCC PS3612.A9442273 (ebook) | LCC PS3612.A9442273 R66
2017 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036788
ISBN 978-1-5011-6583-2
ISBN 978-1-5011-6584-9 (ebook)
Roomies Page 28