Downtown Devil: Book 2 in series (Sins in the City) (17 page)

V
aughn woke in a funk, a mix of confusion and shame and lust, a hangover of emotion.

Did he regret last night? Not exactly. Not completely.

No one had been hurt, they’d all gotten off, so what was there to feel bad about?

She knows. She saw.

He had no business having a crush on Clare. Well, hold up. On the one hand, he had the perfect reason. He was sleeping with her. And he’d liked her before that, whether he’d wanted to admit it or not. She was all the things he valued most, romantically—creative, funny, adventurous. All the things that kept him from taking life too seriously, plus . . . she was just cool. The way she looked at objects and shadows and people through her photographer eyes, like she saw a million tiny things that others missed. Vaughn witnessed a lot of ugliness in his day-to-day world, but he bet she saw beauty in the most unusual places.

But he knew too well she was into Mica, and once his friend grew bored with the woman and phased her out, Clare would probably be
feeling understandably pissed or hurt and have precisely zero interest in seeing Vaughn—not romantically, and not randomly, out around Pittsburgh. So yeah, no point liking her as much as he did, but you didn’t get to control that crap, did you? And he did like her. And she’d seen him.

Seen him with Mica.

He felt fire in his cheeks and shut his eyes, blocking out the stripes of early sunlight patterning the ceiling.

She liked it, though. And she’s got no reason to use it against me.
He’d been nothing but nice to her, plus, they didn’t run in the same social circles. He trusted her with his darkest secret, as perhaps she trusted him with the same. But it couldn’t quiet the nagging voice telling him that he’d lost a chunk of his manhood, in her eyes. And yeah, that stung.

There was more, as well, he thought as he kicked the covers aside and sat up. There was anger inching through his veins this morning, and it wasn’t tough to trace it back to the source.

Mica had gotten what he’d wanted all along. He’d gotten Vaughn to break that one rule he’d laid down when Mica had moved in. And he’d gone about it the shady, sneaky, tricky, patently Mica way—he’d gotten Clare to break it for him.

The kid might never earn himself a degree, but he deserved some honorary PhD in manipulation.

“You should be a lawyer,” Vaughn muttered, grabbing his towel off the doorknob. The loopholes his best friend could conjure for the sake of sex . . .

He stepped out into the hall and found the bathroom empty. Mica’s door was shut, and a little bolt of jealousy or desire shot hot and cold down Vaughn’s back, to know that Clare was beyond that wood, maybe lying naked in a tangle of covers, lit by the early-morning light.

It was stupid to feel jealous, though.
I mean, I’ve slept with her. Twice. Done more with her than I usually manage with a new girlfriend in a month, let alone two nights—

He paused at the bathroom threshold at the sound of clacking in the kitchen. Mica came into view, crossing into the den with his phone in hand, eyes on its screen. Vaughn leaned into the bathroom to toss his towel on the tub’s edge, then headed to the front of the apartment.

Mica was texting, by the look of his fingers, sitting on the couch’s edge.

“Hey.”

He looked up. “Hey. Morning.” He smiled. “Bet you slept like the fucking dead, huh?”

“Not bad.” Not bad, considering the cloud of uncertainty Vaughn had wandered into, the second he’d left Mica’s room. “Clare still asleep?”

“Yeah.” With a final glance, Mica switched off his phone and slipped it into his back pocket. He passed by Vaughn to return to the kitchen. “Tell her bye for me, will you? That girl’s a sound fucking sleeper.”

Vaughn whipped around. “Whoa—hold up. You’re taking off
again
?”

Mica grabbed his keys off the counter. “I’m seven to three today.”

“You get how rude it is that you’ve not
once
been around when she wakes up here? In your bed?”

He shrugged. “I told her. And you’re here. Till ten, right?”

“That’s not the point. She’s your guest. She’s your
date
.” It was all he could do to keep his voice down.

Mica smiled. “She’s both our lovers. She make you nervous or something?”

“No, it’s just . . . You don’t even fucking wake the girl up to say good-bye? I mean . . .” He sighed and rubbed his face. “Jesus, you just don’t fucking get it, do you?”

“Get what?”

“How people expect to be treated, when you hook up with them. How they
deserve
to be treated.”

Mica grabbed his mug off the table and held Vaughn’s stare. “I invited her over. We got her off. She had a good fucking time, and nobody’s kicking her out at two in the morning. She can sleep in, shower, have a coffee with you—I thought that’s how this was working. Sounds pretty fucking nice, if you ask me. You think I want to go to work? You think I wouldn’t rather be rolling around in that bed with her all morning?”

Vaughn narrowed his eyes and spoke the truth. “I do, actually. I think that disappearing out the door before she wakes up is exactly what you want.” He’d done the equivalent enough times to Vaughn, after all.

Mica wasn’t typically an early riser. He’d often been the last kid the counselors managed to get up for breakfast before a morning hike, back in their teenage years. But whenever he and Vaughn had messed around, Vaughn always woke to find him gone. Up with the sun, sitting by a fire making a pot of coffee or a pan of oatmeal. Without fail. That was Mica—he always left first, even if he escaped only a few yards away.

So nobody gets a chance to leave him first.

Christ, it was fucking maddening.

“I can’t help when they schedule me,” Mica said.

“That’s not what we’re talking about and you know it.”

“Then what are we talking about?” He raised his brows and sipped his coffee.
Prick.

Vaughn sighed, exasperated. “Forget it.” The kid had been analyzed enough, he supposed. And Vaughn didn’t like lecturing, didn’t relish the role of the parent. They were too many things to each other as it was. Though questions still nagged . . .

“Last night . . . This entire thing with Clare. Tell me this—do you actually, really like her?”

“Sure.”

“This wasn’t some roundabout ploy to get . . . for you and me to . . .”

Mica smiled, brows rising once more. “You think I started seeing her to get to you somehow?”

“I’m just asking.”

“You think I couldn’t have gotten there without her, huh? With just you and me and a fifth of whiskey, any night I wanted to.”

Anger edged in. “Oh, fuck you.”

That smile became a grin, of the shit-eating variety. “You could if you wanted. Anytime.”

“I told you how this was going to work when I said you could stay.”

“And you actually believed a word of that?” Mica leaned back against the counter, crossing his arms. “About you and me under one roof for an entire summer, not picking up where we left off? And here I figured that was some sort of foreplay.”

He ignored that bait. “Just tell me this—are you only using Clare?”

“Of course I am.”

That simmering anger reached a boil, but Mica went on. “Same as she’s using me—for sex. That’s how casual shit works, and you’d know that if you were capable of it. Two people use each other, and it doesn’t have to mean they don’t also like each other.”

“She does
like
you. For real, not just for the sex.”

“She tell you that?”

“As a matter of fact, yeah. She basically did.”

“And you like her,” Mica said. Not a question.

Vaughn didn’t reply. His face felt hot.

“So she likes me, and you like her. Feels like there’s a missing link in this chain.”

“If all this was just some play to get to me—to fuck with the
one
rule I laid down when I said you could stay here—it’s not okay. And not because it’s a fucked-up thing to do to me. Because of Clare. She’s too nice a girl to get messed around like that.”

“So tell her.”

That drew him up short. He could, he supposed. But tell her what, exactly?
Mica was only using you to get to me. It’s only about the sex with him, so if you’ve got feelings, you’d be smart to walk away now.
And where would that get them all, precisely? She’d deny having serious feelings for Mica, he bet, and he’d only sound like a crazy dick. Plus . . . Well, plus, he’d never see her again. Never touch her, taste her. She didn’t care for him, but there was no denying that what he felt was real. He wanted her worse than he’d wanted a girl in a few years now, and he couldn’t say the sex on offer was without its twisted appeal.

What the fuck is wrong with me anyway?
What dude stayed hot for a woman he’d seen fucking his best friend, with his own eyes? In his own
bed
?

I barely know her anyway.
Maybe it didn’t feel like it, when they talked, but he couldn’t use that as an excuse to ignore reality.

“You know,” Mica said, “if you want a turn with her alone, just say the word. I’ll invite her over, get held up . . .”

“Excuse me?”

He shot Vaughn a cocky look. “She’s had us in every other combination already, right?”

“That’s so fucking out of line.”

“Why? It’s true.”

“Put your fucking eyebrow down, you asshole. Your tone’s shitty and you know it.”

“Hey, man, sorry. I was just making a fucking joke.”

“Don’t say shit like that about a woman in front of me. Not about a woman you’ve
slept
with, for fuck’s sake. What’s wrong with you, man?” The question had a long answer, one that Vaughn knew well and didn’t need spelled out.

“Just a joke,” Mica repeated, holding his hands up in irritable surrender. “Sorry.”

“I’m not the one you owe an apology to, you know. She’s a nice girl and she
likes
you. A lot.”

“I never told her it was anything more than sex.”

“Doesn’t matter. People hook up, they get intimate, there’s feelings, man. If you weren’t a borderline sociopath you’d get that. You’d
care.
You know what—fucking forget it. Go to work.” Vaughn turned away, drinking his coffee, done with this conversation.

That was all the dismissal Mica needed. He patted his pockets, checking for a wallet or phone, and clapped Vaughn on the shoulder as he headed for the door. “Show her a good time for me.”

“Whatever.”

As the door clicked shut at his back, Vaughn couldn’t help but think,
Watch me.
He
would
show her a good time. Show her that at least one man in this apartment knew how to treat the woman he was sleeping with. Even as he dreaded the inevitable questions she’d have for him when she woke up, he’d face them with a smile and fix her a cup of coffee exactly how she liked it. He’d let his behavior tell her how he felt toward her—grateful, humbled . . . fond.

Because Vaughn could admit it—beyond the physical attraction,
he liked her. Liked her a lot. It was as deep a crush as he’d had in the past few years, though, man, if it hadn’t evolved all ass-backward.

Not half as backward as how me and Mica wound up where we did.

The two summers they’d spent together at Urban Exchange, Vaughn had hated the guy. Mica had been a skinny, broody kid, with eyes that looked like they’d seen more than any fifteen-year-old should. He still had those eyes, but they’d changed. Those dark rings were gone, probably the work of good nutrition, and there was rarely hate in them these days. Just the tiniest flash now and then, probably invisible to anybody except Vaughn. Back when they’d done UE, the kid had been brimming with anger. Everything had been like a threat to him. Everyone around him a potential enemy. He’d also been a little mastermind when it came to figuring out a person’s weaknesses, a person’s triggers, pinpointing their softest, rawest spots, and then making it his mission to jam a finger right there until they snapped.

He’d gotten Vaughn to snap, halfway through their second summer. He’d kept himself so cool for so long, but Mica had overheard him telling another boy about his dog, Roxy. She was a Shepherd, a retired security dog his family had adopted when Vaughn had been eight. Some of his best and final memories of his mom had been of walking Roxy—long, prideful walks around the neighborhood, feeling full of himself that such a good-looking, well-behaved dog was theirs. Every night they’d walked her, rain or shine or snow, even through his mom’s diagnosis, even through chemo. When Roxy had died, at the ripe old age of sixteen, it had been like losing his mom all over again. He’d told a friend so, at UE. He’d cried. Mica had overheard, and when he used that bait to goad Vaughn into a fight the next morning, he’d gotten exactly what he wanted.

Vaughn hadn’t been a kid who fought—not much, anyhow. His
folks had raised him to turn the other cheek, though he’d been in the odd scrap. What Mica had unleashed in him hadn’t been a scrap, though—it had been rage like he’d never felt before. Fuck with his dog, fuck with his mom. Mica had been scrappier than him, but Vaughn had been bigger. He’d always been big, one of the tallest in his class, one of the first to start getting muscles. He’d have fucked Mica up pretty bad if the fight had gone on longer than the twenty seconds it had, and he’d nearly gotten booted out of the program. He could remember now, thirteen years later, the smell of Tyler Goodman’s Jeep. He’d been the senior counselor who pried the boys apart, and he’d made Vaughn sit in his passenger seat for nearly two hours after, wanting to know what on earth that fight had been about.