“Sports dude. Anyway, come out and make dinner before these jerks order from some sketchy place.”
She breezed past me into the hall. “You just want me for my food.”
“Well, duh.”
Dinner went about as well as could be expected. Carly gave me the cold shoulder and sat as far away from Giovanni as the apartment allowed. I half expected her to take her plate out on the fire escape. Tray and Kizzy ate as if they’d never seen food before, and Mrs. Knox ate quietly while reading a magazine tucked beside her plate. Slater spent the night texting his mystery girl and Giovanni ate one bite of food for every two bites he fed the dog.
After all the plates had been licked clean and Carly had retired—to the bathroom, the only room with a lock that wasn’t occupied—with a supposed headache, the rest of the crew decided to split too. Leaving Tray and his serious face and his sleeping dog behind.
“I don’t want to hear it,” I began.
“Hear what?” he asked pleasantly, sitting so close to me on the couch that the seams of our jeans practically created sparks. “Perhaps you mean you don’t want to hear that the Gio and Carly situation is old news, and you don’t need to do damage control every time they’re anywhere near each other.”
“Gio this, Gio that. Why is he your best friend all of a sudden?”
He didn’t reply. A wise man knew silence was the best tactic to deal with a woman in full temper. Which only made me want to fight with him all the more.
“There’s tension there. Can’t you feel it? I can feel it. It’s like a cloud in the room.”
“And your way of dispersing it is bragging about how many dudes she’s sleeping with?”
“One dude. Just one.”
“With the possibility of more.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Yours, except when you’re doing the exact opposite of what you should be if you truly want to keep them apart.”
“Which is?”
He lifted my hand and separated my fingers as if they were the most fascinating thing in the world. “Minding your own business.”
“Like I don’t know that.” I dropped my head on the back of the couch. “How’d your test go?”
“Aced it.”
“Of course you did. Brown-noser.” I sighed. “I apologized once.”
“Huh?”
“To Carly. I apologized.”
“How’d that work for you?”
“You saw. She hates me.” I sighed. “Let’s go to bed.”
Grinning, he dropped a kiss on my head. “Your segues are truly something to behold. This, folks, is why I love this woman.”
“Jackass, I meant to sleep. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.” It took a lot for me to acknowledge we had a long day ahead, not just me. It was hard getting used to being part of a team, never mind truly believing we were one.
And part of that involved what I was about to do before we went to sleep, no matter how nauseous it made me.
“You naked in a sleeping bag is a recipe for good any way you cut it.” He waggled his brows as I hauled my shirt over my head and pulled on the sleepshirt I’d left right in the sleeping bag.
The world’s best housekeepers, we were not.
“You know I don’t sleep naked.”