Lingus (25 page)

Anything to balance out the perfection that he was overall, but fucking — and I don't mean literally — Tristan was just perfect and I kind of hated him for it.

He smiled at me smugly, and then wiggled between the covers. I had to wonder whether or not I'd just said any of my thoughts aloud, but I didn't think so. "Read me a bedtime story?" he tried to ask, but laughed instead.

"Shut up," I groaned, tearing my eyes away from his pillowy pecs to turn off the side lamp. My bed was big enough for me. It was a queen-size, but with both of us on it, I couldn't move my hand more than a couple of inches without risking the chance of grazing bare skin that didn't belong to me. Damn it. "Goodnight."

"Night, Kat," he replied. I sensed the movement of his hand before the heat of it. He brushed his fingertips across my palm, squeezing lightly for just a moment.

I laid there, clenching my eyes closed so that I was not tempted to roll over and stare at him in his sleep.

"Kat?"

"Yes?"

He let out another yawn. "You're my favorite person in the world. Goodnight."

I was trying to just manage to breathe, and then think after his words. By the time I realized I should have responded, his breathing was low and even. He'd fallen asleep, and I felt like I just cured cancer. How the hell I managed to fall asleep after that, I wasn't sure. I was aware that at some point, I woke up after dreaming that I peed in the middle of a grocery store. I was secretly paranoid I may have actually peed on myself for the first time in twenty years, not including the little pees I'd experienced laughing. I squeezed my thighs together and thanked Morpheus, the god of dreams, for not being a cruel jokester.

As I came to my senses, I realized that I wasn't on my side of the bed anymore. I was still facing the bathroom door but in the middle of the bed, and there were lips on the back of my neck. Dry lips with warm breath trailed down the length of my neck while a big hand with calloused fingers grazed my bare stomach and hip, pressuring my bladder just the slightest bit. There was a chest so close to my back that I thought if I were to lean back just an inch or two, I'd be pressed against it.

I couldn't help the shiver that rolled through my spine or the goosebumps that prickled up along my arms at the feeling of lips and hands.

Was he awake?

I wanted to know, but I didn't move.

Lips touched the crook of my neck and shoulder but this time they were wet. Then, a second later the mouth disappeared. The hand stayed on my hip and only warm breathing washed over my neck. This was so inappropriate...

I didn't move an inch.

Chapter 36

With a heavy heart, I picked up the phone to call my dad the next afternoon. The previous night's conversation with Tristan had shaken me deeply. Frank, my dad, and I had always had a great relationship. We were each other's best friends for almost ten years after my mom died. My dad always made an effort to stay home and do things with me each chance he got. He didn't go out or do things with his friends unless he took me along. It wasn't until high school that I truly appreciated how great my dad was. It was with that in mind that I felt like a terrible daughter since I hadn't paid him a visit in so long.

"Which jail do you need me to bail you out of?" he answered on the second ring.

The laugh that exploded out of me was loud. "Oh, please!"

Frank chuckled on the other end. "I'm just kidding, baby. How are you?"

Settling onto the couch, I peered at the picture on my side table of the both of us at my high school graduation. "I'm good, dad. Are you okay?"

"Cool as a cucumber, Kitty. I'm waiting for my next customer to get home and trying not to fall asleep in the meantime. How are the girls?" he asked, knowing I understood that he included Josh with that group.

"They're all good. Nikki is getting married, did you know?" I already knew that he probably did. The old man stalked his Facebook account every chance he got and Zoey was always posting something on there.

"I just got the invitation a few days ago. I made plans to go to the casino with Mike that weekend but buy her something from the both of us," he said before telling me all about the trip he was taking with his best friend to Louisiana. I told him a little more about Nicole's wedding in Vegas, and then about finishing up my book. We talked easily for a few minutes before he dropped the bomb on me. "No new boyfriend, Kitty?"

I groaned as a response. "Not a boyfriend, just a new friend."

My dad snickered loudly. "Men can't be friends with pretty girls unless they have feelings for them, baby. "

"Well this one seems to be an exception. Trust me."

He made a noise like he was thinking before exhaling. "Whatever you say, but if you want me to knock some sense into him—"

"Dad! You wouldn't hurt anyone if I paid you to," I laughed, remembering the times he'd gone out of his way to avoid getting into arguments with people.

"I wouldn't, but I know people!" the silly man answered.

Chapter 37

"Girls versus guys."

Nicole let out an unladylike snort. "More like girls versus bitches."

Josh cackled as he tied his bowling shoes. "In that case, I'm on the girls' team."

Tristan turned to look at Calum who sat next to him, smelling his pair of shoes with a face that was a little too curious and not enough disgusted. "You're definitely a bitch, Cal."

"Babe, do you think I'm a bitch?" Calum's deep voice asked Nikki, who was sitting in front of the keyboard typing names away for each of the lanes.

"Baby, I promised you I would never lie to you, so please don't ask me to start today," she said without blinking, her eyes locked on the screen in front of her.

Zoey, who was sitting right next to me on the lane we'd designated for the females, laughed and gave me a high-five at Nicole's response. Tristan and Calum were sitting on the opposite side of the lane and bickering over who was a bigger bitch. "This is going to be fun," she announced with a big smile on her face.

She'd been gone for a little over a week, and I'd missed her pretty face. The night before, Josh and I had gone to pick her up from the airport, before staying over at her apartment to watch the first three
Harry Potter
movies back to back. Yes, we were an overgrown bunch of geeks who banded together to read all of the books and cried when Dumbledore and Dobby died. I think Josh had a secret crush on one of the characters from the movies but he wouldn't admit which one.

"Kat and Joshua, you're up first," Nikki said.

"I'm going to kick your fanny, Booger," Josh claimed, going up to the center to retrieve his ball at the same time I did.

"You probably are considering all the experience with balls you have," I snickered with a wink.

The blonde snapped his fingers in my face as he brought his dark blue ball up to his chin, preparing to bowl. "You wish you've had as much ball experience as I do."

He bowled a strike on his turn while I only managed to knock down 8 pins total. We gave each other a high-five before returning to our respective seats on opposite ends. About an hour later, we'd moved around the seats a bit. Zoey, Tristan, and I sat on our original lane, while Nikki sat on Calum's lap between turns, and Josh settled for glaring at the happy couple when he could. We, the females, had won the first game.

As fate would have it, Calum was just as terrible at bowling as Tristan. He kept saying, "I was on a league!" but obviously, he’d been on the same one as Tristan— an imaginary league. Or possibly one with bumpers, was another of my best guesses.

Zoey rested her feet on my lap as Nikki and Calum went up to bowl against each other. "I talked to Ryan this morning," she said with a naughty look in her eye.

"That's cool," I said slowly, raising an eyebrow in her direction. Tristan was sitting right next to me with his forearm brushing mine, but his attention was focused on the lane. I mouthed out a "What?" to her, because even though Zoey was pretty random, this was unexpected. She talked to Ryan at least three times a week and had never made an effort to let me know that she had spoken to him unless there was gossip. Or, the time she had asked him to prescribe her cream for her hemorrhoids and he flipped out.

She winked at me so dramatically I had to turn my head slightly to make sure Tristan wasn't looking at her. "I didn't know you were going to a wedding with him," she drawled out.

That bitch.

I loved her.

His arm stiffened, it was the smallest fraction of a movement and barely noticeable. "Yeah, he asked me last weekend when Josh decided to ruin my face." The bruise on my face was more yellow and brown by then, rather than purple, blue, and red.

"It was an accident!" he bellowed from the other side.

"Mind your own business!" Zoey waved the nosey turd off. "I'm glad you're going with him instead of that skank he was going to take before. She's such a slut, and you know for me to call someone a slut, she really is one," she sighed dramatically.

It was Tristan and Zoey's turn to bowl, so she held up her index finger asking me to give her a second while she went up and bowled nine before picking up her spare. Tristan, on the other hand, knocked down a total of six. That was the equivalent of a strike by his standards. I couldn't hear what they were saying to one another because their voices were surprisingly low and the music was too loud, but Zoey punched him in the arm on their walk back to their seats.

"Good try," I laughed when I passed by my auburn-haired friend on the way up to the lane as he tugged at my ponytail in response.

"You're going down, bitch," Josh hissed from my right, already prepped and ready with his ball.

After I bowled a strike — thank God — I went back to sit between Zoey and Tristan again. Her smile looked a little crazy and it scared me.

"What dress are you going to wear to the wedding?" she asked like she really cared.

"I don't know."

"Wear that cute blue one, the strapless one that's almost too short? You can show off those legs, tiger." Her voice was even and calm, but the look on her face was a contradiction of alert and amused. Her eyes flickered back and forth between my face and Tristan's. "I told Ry that he needs to think about settling down before all of his friends get married and he's the lonely loser."

Uh
. For the record, Zoey could care less about marriage, so her little rant about wanting Ryan to get married was a whole pile of bull shit. When Tristan stiffened next to me, making a noise that sounded like he was clearing his throat, the little vixen gave me a thumbs-up. Oh. My. God.

"I'm gonna go pee, I'll be back." She stood up, wiping imaginary lint off her jeans. "Just bowl for me, KAB." Then, she was off, practically skipping to the restroom.

Tristan decided to turn and look at me then, giving me the opportunity to appreciate the fact that his superb, finely cut jaw was clenched. He didn't say a word as Nikki and Calum sat back down, but he did wave me up to follow him so we could grab our balls to bowl. I was a little faster than him at prepping, so my ball was flying down the lane a few seconds before his.

"You're going to a wedding?" he asked me casually, while we waited for our balls to come back.

"Yeah, on Saturday." I answered, looking at the machine that returned the balls. I glanced up at him, but his broad frame was facing the lanes while his hands were shoved deep inside his jean pockets.

"Cool," he muttered in a deep voice.

I knew he was leaving on Friday again, because he told me about it a few days before and that familiar, sickening feeling in my stomach made a mess of my intestines. I had a brief flashback to two days before, when I woke up in the middle of the night to Tristan's form against mine. By the time I got up in the morning he was already awake and attempting to make French toast. He didn't say anything about the night before, and I sure as hell wasn't going to be the one to point out anything he potentially could have done in his sleep. Why couldn't I be a telepath? Or even have some balls to invite him to spend the night again?

I bowled again for Zoey and waited for Tristan to bowl before I gave him a high-five. Josh was up and talking a whole lot of shit before our turn, and by the time I made it back to the seats, Zoey hadn't made it back. My auburn-haired friend was sitting in his seat with his spine straight and shoulders pushed so far back it looked border-line painful.

The lovely green eyes I was so fond of were looking between my still colorful cheek and eyes. "Want to come over for a while after we finish here? I'll make spaghetti."

Damn him and his mom's spaghetti recipe.

I was such a sucker.

Chapter 38

"I haven't been here in years," I said quietly, peering into the huge water world just a few feet away.

Tristan leaned into me, bumping my shoulder against his arm. "I come here with my mom a couple times a year."

We were at the Miami Seaquarium on Thursday. He managed to get off work early and invited me to go with him for fun. It was the first time we'd actually gone anywhere besides the animal shelter, grocery store, and pet store. Not that I minded staying at his house for the most part, because we're both home-bodies but this was a nice change. Still in his work clothes, Tristan was too much for the human eye in his black dress pants, light blue button-up shirt, and rolled up sleeves. Professional Tristan was way too much for my eyes and hormones, and by the sultry looks every woman in the aquarium had shot him— they all agreed with me.