Annoyance crawled up his throat and constricted his chest. He fumbled around the room, half asleep, his head a mess from the night before- a night that didn’t even feel real given that Noemi was no longer in bed with him. She was obviously not in the house either, given that the banging went on unabated. If she was there, she probably would have either got the door or got him by now.
He fumbled in the tall dresser in the room for one of the few extra pairs of jeans he’d jammed in there the day before. He tugged the faded denim on and nearly zipped his cock into the zipper in his hurry. He winced, even though his member was currently okay, snugged away and zipper free. He didn’t need to give himself a trip to the ER for the most embarrassing thing on earth. What he needed to do was slow the hell down.
And answer the front fucking door since whoever was out there was still pounding away.
He stumbled to the door, feeling hungover from the few shots he’d had and the tremendous lack of sleep. He was emotionally drained, something he wasn’t used to feeling because usually he shut down and shut that shit out. He wasn’t used to feeling anything and then Hurricane Noemi swept into his life, or more like he went storm chasing and got what he was asking for in a big way. Turned out karma really was a bitch.
Of course, the one person on earth he could actually see himself with, the one person he wanted to get to know, was the one person who wanted nothing to do with him.
The real him.
Not the fake him.
He reached the door without stumbling and falling on his face or tearing a toe off on anything. His eyes still felt grainy and the banging went straight to his already overtired, overworked brain. What the hell time was it anyway? He felt like he’d slept a total of five minutes the night before and it actually physically hurt after the jetlag of the previous days.
Thwamp, thump, bump, bang, bang, baaaannnnggggg…
The pounding went on and on and he turned the handle, realizing that the lock was on. Noemi must have flipped it before she left. Which was nice. She obviously liked him enough to lock the door so no one could come in and steal his shit or murder him in his sleep. He was touched, really.
He tugged the door open ready to give whatever mailman or maybe even the little prick of a landlord out there a piece of his nearly braindead mind.
Noemi.
It took him a surprisingly short amount of time to realize that it wasn’t a mailman, a solicitor, someone peddling religion, or his landlord.
It was a very pissed off, red faced, thin lipped, nostrils flared, brow scrunched, eyes spitting hate, raging version of his sort of fiancé.
Fuck me sideways and backwards. She knows.
Even his foggy-ass brain could process that much. She looked at him, looked down at her tote bag, looked back at him, then pulled out a white piece of paper with a picture on it. Of him.
“You’re a sick piece of shit,” she growled.
Yeah. It was going to be one of those conversations. Nothing good started out that way. He immediately abandoned his plans to talk her down and went right into defense mode.
“Noemi- please. This isn’t- I- I did come looking for you. I just wanted to talk. I wanted to see if we could come to some kind of agreement. I didn’t expect- I- I’m sorry. I- I met you and it just… I wanted to see if you’d actually enjoy hanging out with me. If you could stand me and I could stand you before I told you who I really was.”
All those words, which he was quite proud of his brain for coming up with, obviously pissed her off a hell of a lot more, because her nostrils went wide and wild. Her eyes shot daggers and if fire could actually pour out of her mouth, he’d be roasted on the spot. In short, she looked like a rage machine and he knew he deserved every single second of her wrath.
“Oh really? Was tonging my vagina part of your plan?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Was telling me you were someone else part of your convoluted plan?”
“It wasn’t exactly- er- the plan… it wasn’t exactly a plan. I just had this idea about-”
“Save it. Fuck you, Byron.”
He leaned against the doorway, fully aware that Noemi’s dark eyes were drawn straight to his very naked chest. He flexed a pec and watched her eyes widen and then she ripped them away and focused on her shoes, a plain, sensible black set of flats.
“That would actually be implying that you’d agree to continue on with this charade, or that you were actually into me, which isn’t exactly the message you’re trying to get across, I’m sure.”