Chapter Three
1063 Words
Wren
"You're using my coffee."
He says it from the doorway of the kitchen at six in the morning, shirtless and damp from a run, like a man who has never once in his life been told no and would not know what to do with the word.
"I am using the coffee that was sitting in the kitchen," I say without turning around. "There were no labels. I am not a mind reader."
"Buy your own."
"I will, on Friday, when I get paid, because unlike some people in this room I actually have a job." I pour the cup and finally turn to look at him, and that is my first mistake of the morning, because he is leaning in the doorway with no shirt on and the kind of body you only get from two practices a day, and I hate, I genuinely hate, that my eyes do a thing before I can stop them.
He catches it. Of course he catches it. He catches everything.
"See something you like, Cole?"
"We need to talk about the bathroom," I say, because it is the least dangerous sentence I can find.
"What about it?"
"Your razor is on my side."
"There are no sides. It's one bathroom."
"There are absolutely sides. My things go on the left. Your things go on the right."
"This is my house.”
"And now you have a roommate. Adjust."
He looks at me. I look at him. "Fine," he says.
I blink. I was braced for a fight. "Fine?"
"Razor goes on the right. Done."
He picks up his water bottle and drinks half of it standing there, and I stand in his kitchen trying to figure out what he gains from folding that fast, because Ace always has an angle. He is always running a play.
Living with Ace Calloway is exactly as bad as I knew it would be, and worse in about six ways I did not see coming.
The man is physically incapable of putting on a shirt. He leaves the bathroom door wide open while he brushes his teeth. And he has this trick where he says something so blunt and so filthy that it short circuits whatever I was about to say, and then he watches me lose the thread completely with this slow, satisfied grin, because getting under my skin is the only sport he loves more than hockey.
On day three he glances up from his phone while I am cooking and says, flat as anything, "New shirt? Something's different. Your t**s look like they're having a really good week." I throw a dish towel at his head. He catches it without looking up.
On day four he walks past me in the hall fresh out of the shower with a towel hung low on his hips and says, "You're staring again, Cole, it's starting to get embarrassing for you," and I am so furious I cannot speak, mostly because he is not completely wrong.
On day five, Sloane Marchetti lets herself in.
I am on the couch with my laptop when the front door opens without so much as a knock and she walks in like she owns the place, which, knowing Ace, she has probably had good reason to believe at some point. She is in heels and a coat that costs more than my entire semester, and she stops dead the second she sees me.
"Oh," she says, and she stretches the word out long enough to turn it into an insult. "They really did take in a stray."
"Sloane." I do not look up from my screen. "Door was unlocked, so I guess manners were optional."
"Cute." She drops her bag on the counter and looks around the apartment like she is appraising it for resale. "Does he actually know you're still here, or are you the kind of charity case that just sort of forgets to leave?"
Ace comes out of his room then, and I wait for it. I actually brace for the moment he laughs along with her, because that is who he is, that is the entire point of him.
He does not laugh.
He looks at Sloane, and then he looks at the bag on the counter, and he says, "What are you doing here?"
"You weren't answering your phone."
"Because I wasn't free." He picks her bag up off the counter and hands it back to her. "I've got film to watch. I'll call you."
"You'll call me," she repeats, and her eyes cut to me, fast and sharp, doing a piece of math she clearly does not like the answer to. "Sure you will."
She leaves, but not before slamming the door, so hard the sink rattles.
I should let it go. I do not let it go.
"That was almost decent of you," I say. "Taking out the trash like that."
"Shut up Cole." He drops onto the far end of the couch and puts on his game tape and does not look at me. "She's not trash. She's just not yours to have opinions about."
"I wasn't having an opinion about her." I close my laptop. "I was having an opinion about the fact that you, the walking human embodiment of a bad decision, just turned down a sure thing on a Friday night to watch hockey with me in the room."
He looks at me then, slow and deliberate, and the light from the TV moves across his face, and there is something in his expression that is not the grin and is not the glare either.
"Maybe I'm tired of that game, want something new… like you” he smirks.
And then, before I can do a single thing with that, before I can even decide whether he means it or whether he is just running another play, he turns back to the screen.
"Go to bed, Cole. You've got that look like you're about to say something you'll regret in the morning."
I did go to bed, but made sure to stand for a little while so that it doesn't appear to like I obeyed him.
I do not sleep.
Because the truly humiliating, unforgivable problem here is not that I hate Ace Calloway.
It is that for one second, sitting on that couch in the dark, I completely forgot to.
- Writer
