The Vampire Diaries: Trust In Betrayal (Kindle Worlds) (In Time We Trust Trilogy Book 3) (56 page)

The door into the back stairway is unlocked, as always, and I take the steps two at a time up to our apartment where we live rent-free ever since Pat did the math on how much new business Cali was bringing him.

It’s tiny, barely more than a studio. A minuscule kitchen with counter space hardly wider than Cali’s hips, plus a bedroom an archway away from the living room with just a queen sized mattress on the floor with way too many pillows and a soft blue comforter pulled crookedly up over the sheets.

Most of the space is in the living room, and we skipped a couch in favor of a piano and racks for my bass and guitar, and Cali’s acoustic and her electric. There’s a breakfast nook, but it has incredible acoustics and she keeps her practice set of old Pearls in there instead of a table. Her real drums, which I swear to God she’d sell both
my
kidneys for, live at her bassist’s house where the band practices.

The only furniture is a giant memory foam beanbag chair that is mostly mine because Cali doesn’t seem to have any interest in sitting on anything but my lap. We’ve fallen asleep curled together on it way too many times to count and no matter what she said downstairs, I’ve never spent a single night in the hammocks down there.

When Elena and Damon are over, my sister always steals the beanbag chair and swears she’s moving in. Personally, I think she does it because it only leaves the piano bench for Damon. If he sits there long enough, he’ll start messing around on the keys, and he’ll even play a whole song or two if I don’t tease him.

One night when he was a few whiskeys deeper than usual, he and Cali played an improvised duet that is still hands-down my favorite piece of piano music I’ve ever heard.

I can’t figure out why a vampire would care, but for some reason Damon
always
bitches about the lack of a table. I don’t miss it, because I used to do my homework in the bar or the library on campus. Now, it’s always in the bar.

Jameson’s doesn’t have a bouncer and mostly they don’t need one because I’m usually around and when I’m not, Dave and Cali’s other regulars would rip the arms off anyone who gave her trouble. If that fails, Ric is half a block and a phone call away.

It was almost a month ago now when it happened.

She saw a guy slip something into the vodka tonic of the girl next to him and Cali didn’t ask questions. She didn’t call the police or go for the mace she keeps by the taps or the Taser I stashed at the register.

She just went over the bar for the guy’s throat and they both hit the floor in an explosion of screaming and fists. By the time the other customers dragged them apart, Roofie Guy was spitting out blood and teeth. Cali ended up with a black eye that covered the entire left half of her face with furious, night-dark swelling, two days before the biggest music festival of the year and an in-depth article from Rocked! Magazine.

I don’t study on campus anymore. In fact, this is the first time I’ve picked up a shift at my own job since it happened and I made damn sure it wasn’t on Dave’s bowling night.

She didn’t get why I was so upset, but every time I looked at her face, it made me feel sick that I hadn’t been there to keep her from getting hurt. Damon understood, though. He never said a word, but he invited me along three times that week when he and Ric went to hunt rogue vampires. Normally they only go out once every couple of months, a little less now that Ric has a steady girlfriend.

I grab a jacket and run a comb through my hair, plucking Cali’s soft black wrap-around sweater out of the closet. Judging by the shoes, she’s more in a leather frame of mind, but if I give her the sweater instead, she’ll be the perfect combination of cuddly and seductive when I get home.

I don’t bother with my keys because the bar will still be open when I get home and the campus is close enough to walk, or ride my longboard if I’m in a hurry.

I close the apartment door behind me without locking it and trot downstairs, checking the New Belgium Brewing clock above the bar.

“Back by eleven,” I say aloud, though I’m talking to Dave more than Cali.

I hang Cali’s sweater on the hook under the bar, even though she didn’t ask for it. She leaves the door open for the fresh air and she’ll start to get chilled about nine, like clockwork, but by then it’ll be too busy for her to run upstairs and get it so she’d end up freezing for two hours until I came home.

She smiles when she catches sight of the sweater, and swings around me with an armload of empty pint glasses, popping up onto her toes to press a kiss into my cheek.

“You can leave your books in the booth for when you get back. I don’t think it’ll get busy enough tonight to need the space, and if we do, they can improve their minds with a little Russian history.” She starts stacking the glasses behind the bar into neat, sparkling pyramids. “You gonna take that last Civil War seminar?”

I snort. “I know more about the Civil War than the professor does.”

“Yeah, but you’re only three credits away from a history major,” she points out. “Why not have something to show for all those just-for-fun classes?”

“I’ve already got Art and Business, I don’t need a dang triple major.”

She grins. “Come on, show those sluts you have a brain to go with that tight ass.” She pats my butt on the way back down the bar and Allison wolf-whistles in approval. I pinch the stem of a maraschino cherry between my fingers and take two steps down to drop it into Allison’s Mojito.

“Don’t encourage her,” I say with a faux-weary lift of my eyebrows, and Allison lifts her drink in thanks. She’s a therapist/music junkie who would eat every fake-red cherry between here and Vermont if we’d let her, and she swears she’d pay me by the hour just to put together playlists for her.

“So what’s the mystery job she’s always complaining about?” Allison asks, biting into her ill-gotten garnish.

“Jer’s a stripper,” Cali says, tossing a bar towel into the hamper with a quick flick of her wrist. Nothing but net.

I give Cali a narrow-eyed look. “I model for figure drawing at the University,” I correct.

“Figure? Like geometry?” asks the man next to Allison. Not sure if he’s her date tonight, but considering that he’s also drinking a Mojito, I don’t have enough respect for him to bother learning his name.

“More like the geometry of the six pack,” Cali says. “Also known as the geometry of how many seven-digit numbers my naked boyfriend can collect from drooling art students in an hour while they sketch every little nook of his body.”

I roll my eyes and catch her fingers below the level of the bar. “I have to go.”

“Don’t stay out too late,” she teases. “Or Dave’ll fall asleep at the bar.”

I squeeze her hand, rubbing my thumb over her ring with the thorny vines on it before I let her go and head out, dropping the pass-through with a clang behind me.

Shit. Her comment sounded like a joke, but it was probably a hint that I’m getting a lecture on being overprotective when I get home. I pull out my phone and text Damon a single number to cheer myself up. He zaps back right away:

I’m already sitting at five overprotective and two jealousy-is-unattractives for October, sucker. Elena’s got Cali beat on nagging four to one on a slow month.

I snicker and step out onto the street.

“I expect at least ten phone numbers or I’m sending you back to the gym for an extra helping of crunches,” Cali calls after me and I just flash her a wave over my shoulder.

She hates figure drawing with a fiery passion. Well, not figure drawing in general. I came out of the class with straight A’s for how many times I’d practiced on her before I ever took a day of instruction. She just hates the idea of people seeing
me
nude, which is weird for someone as unselfconscious as she is. But it’s good money, I don’t mind being naked, and I’d never tell her this, but it’s a great way to make friends.

After class when the teacher and his be-professional scowl are nowhere to be found, the girls (and some of the guys) find me and then it’s maybe coffee sometime or let’s grab a beer, sometimes a straight phone number or even a wink and a promise of no strings attached. I tell them I’ve got a girl I’m crazy for and one and all, they melt at that and I’ve made a friend for life. It’s made the art department a hell of a lot more cozy, and actually
less
people hit on me now than they did when I was a freshman.

Damon says it works the opposite for him when he picks up a shift, but I’m fairly sure he only models to find willing snack food, and it’s not like he leaves any of the girls with a memory of having approached him, anyway. Compulsion is not the best way to make friends.

But then again, Damon doesn’t really seem to want new friends, and I don’t know why he’d need them considering how attached at the hip he and Ric are. With as often as vampires move, I wonder how many times they’ll share a U-Haul before they’ll admit it’s not just an accident that they live in the same town all the time.

After the Augustine bullshit, we all moved back to Mystic Falls together and got apartments. I was the first to head to Richmond, as soon as I could scrounge the right test results to shrug off the rest of high school. Caroline and Elena tried to go back to Whitmore that spring, which meant Stefan and Damon went along and Ric “just happened” to rent a room down the street. The next semester Elena broke down and transferred up to Richmond, at the same time as Ric “decided” he needed his Ph.D. in history so he could teach college instead of high school, and enrolled right alongside Elena. I’m betting when Stefan and Caroline come back this Thanksgiving, Caroline will decide to finish up her degree here, too.

There was a time in my life when I would have been pissed that my whole family basically followed me to college but that time is absolutely not now. I missed them all like crazy for the few months we spent apart and yeah, I can call Elena and Ric when I feel like talking, but Damon’s not exactly the type of guy you dial just to “catch up.” If his phone rings and nobody’s dying, he thinks you’re weird.

It’s much easier to hang out now since we live only a couple miles from each other. Plus, I think it helped Cali a lot to have family close by when she lost her grandma. And yeah, they’re technically my family and friends, not hers, but at this point there’s not much of a difference.

After Stefan healed Gram, she had perfect health, which she used to go to
all
of Aperture’s concerts, no matter how out of place she looked. She also had a great time with her second-favorite hobby: making me blush, however she could manage it. But after six months, she had another stroke, this one permanent. Sometimes, I think I miss her as much as Cali does.

Gram would have had way too much fun with the idea of me modeling nude, though, so I’m glad I didn’t do it when she was still around.

Tonight I modeled for two art classes, so by the time I’m loping out of the dressing room, happy to be free to scratch my balls again, it’s pushing the time I told Dave I’d be back.

The bar is filling up when I get there and I slide a keen eye over the crowd, watching for anybody who is a little too tipsy or anyone with the smooth reflexes of the inhuman. The patrons mostly look calm and unthreateningly mortal, so I relax, smiling when I see a familiar set of hunched shoulders lined up next to Dave.

I take the long way around the bar, clapping the old Marine on the back on my way by.

“Dave, thought I told you to keep the riffraff out of the bar?”

Dave grunts. “Shit, I thought this riffraff grew up out of the bar. Little like a fungus.”

“Ha ha,” Ric says dryly, not looking up from his notes. He’s got a stack of professional journals half a foot high in front of him, and his bourbon is going watery as the ice cubes melt.

“How’s your advisor this week?” I ask him while I hang up my jacket.

“Sadistic, know-it-all son of a bitch, as usual,” he grouses.

Ric’s on the Ph.D. fast track to a teaching position at the University, and all the faculty members already adore him. Which means the academic ballbusting is out of control and they keep him busy as hell.