Bitter Angel (4 page)

Jay was a rarity indeed. He loved with his whole heart, was patient to a freaking fault, and I was busting his chops for it.
Shame on me.

Still, I had to tell him how I felt. “You could’ve suggested I stay,” I offered, somewhat sulkily.

Cold air swept across the back of my neck as he removed his hands. “I didn’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“Because…” He clenched his teeth and shook his head, not finishing whatever was on his mind.

I could’ve pressed it, but this conversation was making me tired. I wanted to enjoy the little alone time we had left. We were leaving in the morning.

Bringing us back to a happier note, I climbed onto his lap and wrapped my arms around his neck. “I’m sorry, baby,” I whispered. “I know this is who you are, and I hate it too, being apart. But I committed to this. To being here. I can’t just up and leave.” There was a reason I was holding onto him so tightly—I was lying my ass off. I wasn’t kidding about the whole taxi thing and stashing a gun in my purse. Just thinking about the noise and smog and filth was enough to make me twitch.

His warm arms hugged me back as he chuckled, “Whatever you need to tell yourself.” He knew I was lying.
Damn him.
“Just promise me you’ll think about it. Seriously this time.”

I pulled back and kissed his cheek. “Promise.” Then I pecked his nose, and he tugged my mouth to his, kissing me deeply. It seemed the serious part of the evening was over, but I couldn’t get over the fact that something felt off.

We had discussed this so many times. Why was Jay suddenly being so persistent about it? And in the middle of fall semester?

I thought about it for a few seconds and chose to let it go. For now, at least. I pushed a wayward curl out of his eyes. “Play my song for me?”

A smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. “Course.”

A couple years ago, when my parents were having one of their day-long brawls, Jay snuck into my room through my window, guitar in hand. With the sound of shattering glass echoing up the hall, he wrote me a song as I cried myself to sleep. Now I asked him to play it every chance I got. It was the soothing balm after any argument, the perfect tune to lull me to sleep, and his silky tenor voice made my heart flutter every time he sang it to me.

We started for the dorm, and my heart beat a little faster for the acoustic serenade that was about to be mine. I squeezed his hand. He squeezed back. We were a team.

I inhaled noisily as I did when we first came out here, and I really thought about what it would be like to leave all of this beauty behind. Leave Heather and Nilah behind. I’d be giving up everything for one piece of wonderful.

I just wasn’t sure if that one piece could overshadow everything else.

Friday, 9:31 p.m.

After arriving downtown in decent time, we checked into our hotel. Since we were obviously getting blitzed tonight, we took a cab to the fancy seafood joint where Nilah had made reservations.

As I perused the barely legible menu—seriously, the font had like twenty curly cues around each letter—I spied the only chicken dish they happened to serve and ordered that, ignoring the subtle sneer Nilah sent my way. She was weird about restaurants. One of her greatest pet peeves was going to a five-star place for a burger or something else equally stupid.

Once the waiter left with our order, Nilah began laying out the plan for the night. Hands splayed on the table, she started in perfect birthday girl fashion. “Okay, guys, first things first. After dinner, we’re going to pre-party at Yoru, then taxi to The Clove, and then hopefully,” she did a jittery hand thing, “we’ll be invited to an after party.”

I arched an eyebrow. “An after party? This isn’t the Academy Awards.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nilah’s hand ball in her lap. I leaned away, feinting a desperate sip of my Dom Perignon.

Heather responded, her excitement amping up to Nilah’s. “Yeah. We were hoping some U of T guys might invite us back for a kegger.”

“Or, maybe some DeVry nerds would do the trick,” I added sarcastically because the University of Tennessee wasn’t the only school in the city radius. “Seriously, guys. A kegger? We could’ve done that back at school.”

Nilah shrugged a shoulder. “So what? We’ve met all the guys in our rinky-dink dorms. At least here we’ll have some fresh meat.”

Heather waggled an eyebrow at me. My friends could be so cheesy.

“Okay,” I asked, making a point, “and while my she-wolf friends are on the prowl, what will the spoken-for wolf do?”

Surprisingly, they each grabbed one of my hands and held tight.

“No worries,” Nilah said, dismissing my comment. “Shes before hes.”

Her total confidence in the lackluster-but-more-classy girl version of “bros before hoes” made me laugh.

Heather backed her up. “We would never leave you behind, or we wouldn’t have asked you to come.”

I tipped my head in an unconvinced manner, but my friends’ giddy moods were not going to be shaken by my ho-hum attitude.

Thank goodness the waiter returned with our dinner. I buried my irritation in a mouthful of chicken pasta something or other. As I sucked up the length of a shockingly tasty noodle, my only hope was that I would still remember my name in the morning.

Friday, 11:17 p.m.

That was what the red digital clock read on the taxi’s dash.

We had just left our pre-party club and were on our way into The Clove. I’d only been there once before, and I had to admit it was pretty swanky. With glass-topped bars, plush hideaways for elite customers, and congested dance floors, it certainly felt like the place to be. Once through the bouncer checkpoint, Nilah, who was attached to Heather, who was attached to me, led our chick-trio to a bar that was up a half-flight of stairs. This bar was less crowded and easier to get instant service.

Since her father was famous for spoiling his one and only daughter, Nilah passed the bartender a credit card and winked in her special way as she informed him to keep an open tab for whatever we wanted. I couldn’t complain, seeing as my poor college butt only had twenty-seven dollars and zero cents to my name. Nilah might be a brat, but at least she was a generous one.

My hips swayed instinctively to whatever severe hip-hop beat was throbbing through the tightly pressed sweaty bodies as Heather pushed a shot into my hand.

“What’s this?” I liked to be sure that whatever I was about to poison myself with at least tasted good. I, unfortunately, was not a cheap beer kind of girl. I’d gotten my fair share of lectures over that one.

“Washington Apple,” Heather yelled over the commotion.

“Cool.” I held up the shot glass as the three of us clinked, hollering to what would hopefully be a spectacular drunken night, and we downed the shot.

Since we had saved our alcohol limit for this place, we each did one more, and then we backed off for a little while, nursing something weaker. My body felt hot and loose, my head swollen with the beginnings of a good buzz. Nilah and Heather were pointing around the room, appraising their man-meat options on the dance floor. I stirred the ice in my glass with my straw and sipped lazily.

Assessment over, their attention landed back on me.

Heather tipped the bottom of my glass, yelling, “Come on! There are some good ones down there. Don’t want‘em getting snatched up.”

Quickly choking down my Sex on the Beach—I’d ordered it as a joke, saying it’d be the only sex I was getting tonight—I set the empty glass on the bar. They each grabbed one of my hands as they did at the restaurant and hauled me down the half-flight of stairs into the middle of an overly crowded platform.

Lights sparkled and shimmered from the high ceiling, illuminating only certain areas. We were at the bottom. All around me I could see people on a higher level, pressing against the metal railings but not seeming to notice as they moved and touched each other in suggestive, lustful ways.

I felt muddled and dreamy. The atmosphere was overwhelmingly intoxicating, leaving me no choice but to move, move, move without thinking or caring. The music pulsed in my ears, hummed through my arms and legs, and tingled at my hips. The alcohol did its job by numbing everything else, including all coherent thought.

Lightweight much?

At first, we did our girly thing like we always did. Even though there were three of us, we giftedly managed to dance with and around each other, leaving no one out for more than a few seconds. One thing we equally had in common was our rhythmic abilities. We could all dance—and very well, I might add.

Too quickly, some guy—thankfully good-looking—came up behind Nilah and put his hands on her hips like he’d known her for years, like she belonged to him. As if he also belonged to her, she slid her hand behind her, up his arm, and around his neck. They moved in perfect tempo together.

Another guy tugged on Heather’s arm and pulled her toward him. Without breaking stride, she yanked me over while I was still within reach and pulled me close in front of her, sandwiching herself between me and the stranger. She was staying true to our other girl rule—no one gets left behind.

We danced for a few songs before Heather squeezed my shoulder and signaled me to the bar. Nilah was still in her own world, so we let her be. The guy that Heather had been dancing with was throwing a couple rumpled bills at the bartender, then he turned toward us with five shot glasses.

He smiled an innocent yet devilish grin. With curly blond hair and a baby face, he looked no older than eighteen, but obviously he had to be twenty-one. Or he had to have a fake ID like we did. Maybe he was eighteen. Coming close, he swept a gaze over us, now that he could see our faces. “You two from around here?”

Heather was doing her flirty lean-in-and-open-eyes-real-wide thing. In high school, it had always driven the boys wild. “No, we go to Waterson Row.”

He frowned.

She laughed. “Exactly. Probably never heard of it.”

“It’s an hour and a half northeast,” I offered.

Even in the dim light, I could see the hunger in his eyes for both of us. The way he was grinning set off a faint warning in my brain. Something was a little predatory about this guy.

Leaning against the bar, he looked past us and winked. “Trigger,” he shouted as he pinched two shot glasses together and slid them our way.

Heather and I glanced back at the same time to see a tall, gawky kid getting up from his seat a few feet away.

“I’m H, by the way,” the guy said, pointing a hand to his burly chest.

The kid came to stand next to him, and H—
what the hell kind a name is that, anyway?
—put an arm around him. “And this is Trigger.”

Wait a minute.
I raised a hand. “So you’re H? As in the letter from the alphabet?” My voice was punctuated with attitude, my specialty.

He shrugged good-naturedly. “Our frat goes by nicknames. We go to UT.”

“Oh cool,” Heather cooed, pointing a demure French-manicured hand to herself. “I’m Heather, and this is my roommate and best friend, Lila.”

“Nice.” He grinned and did a little nod. “You girls driving back tonight?”

Heather coyly shook her head. “Nope. We got a hotel. It’s our other roommate’s birthday.”

H cocked his head. “Is she as hot as you?”

Heather giggled.

“You girls got boyfriends?”