“Those two give me whiplash …” He paused. “Scratch that. Gray gives me whiplash. Kassa is just about the only person who could put up with him for longer than an hour.
“They grew up together. His aunt adopted her and Jace, and then he had to move in with them. She became his best friend in the world, more so than me or even Sin.” He frowned. “Before we came out here, Gray and Kas were inseparable. She was his shadow, and he ate it up. Then, we get here and it was like he was always on the phone with her. If she couldn’t talk to him for whatever reason, he became the biggest dick this side of the equator.”
“I’m not sure that’s changed,” I assured him.
“That’s because he’s only gotten worse since she moved out here. The girl can’t leave their apartment without him giving her the third degree. He’s become this overbearing dickhead. She’s starting to see how he really is, but she doesn’t seem to care. She loves him, anyway, and he can’t see that all she wants is for him to love her back.”
“That’s really sad.”
Even though I had barely spoken to Kassa, I felt sorry for her. I’d seen how easy it was for her to make Gray act like a decent human being, and I had spotted the longing in her big blue eyes that she tried to hide from the world. She hid it well, I would give her that, but I was used to seeing into strangers’ souls. It was why I was so good at reading people.
And I was normally spot on.
Until Kale.
I was still blind where he was concerned, unable to get a good read on him, but I liked that. It made it that much more fun to get to know him.
NINE
Kale
I wasn’t in my apartment all that often. Until we had gotten the record deal, I had only been home long enough to shower and sleep because I had been working all the time. So, my apartment wasn’t a mess when I unlocked and opened the door for Santana.
Waving her in, I adjusted the pizza boxes in my arms then followed after her.
I only had the bare minimum for furniture, including a couch in the living room that had come with the apartment. After Kin had come over with Jace the first time, she had put some kind of soft black covering on it, saying she couldn’t handle how ugly the thing was. I’d had to agree. The thing had been covered in stains and had smelled like mothballs. It had taken her all of ten minutes to clean it up for me and make the damn thing smell like fresh linen.
The only other furniture in the living room was the old coffee table that had also come with the apartment. I had put a cheap flat screen on it when I’d first moved in. I kept meaning to get a new one, but there wasn’t anything wrong with the current one.
We walked through the living room and straight into the kitchen. It was small, with only a small fridge that was full of beer and water, a microwave that had seen better days, and a stove I didn’t even know if it worked or not since I had never touched it. There wasn’t much counter space, so I put the boxes on the stove and opened a cabinet to pull out the small stack of paper plates that had been left over from the last time the guys had been over to jam.
“Beer or water?” I asked as I opened the fridge.
“I’ll take a beer,” she said as she opened the boxes and started putting two plates together. “Blue cheese or ranch with you wings?”
“Whichever you don’t want, doll. I’m not picky.” I opened both bottles of beer.
She handed over a plate piled high with pizza, wings, and bread sticks. Sucking hot sauce off her thumb, she picked up her own plate that barely had anything on it.
“That’s all you’re eating?”
She glanced down at her plate. Two slices of pizza, two wings, and one breadstick. “I’ll be lucky if I eat all of this without exploding.”
“You haven’t eaten since breakfast.” I picked up another slice of the ham and pineapple and put it on her plate, along with another hot wing. When she opened her mouth, I knew she was about to argue, so I dropped a kiss on her forehead. “Please? For me?”
She let out a soft huff, but a small smile teased at her lips. “Okay, but if my stomach explodes, you have to clean up the mess. Deal?”
“Deal.”
I led her back into the living room and grabbed the remote before dropping down on the couch beside her. “Netflix? Amazon? Hulu?”
“You don’t have dish or cable?” She took a huge bite of her first slice of pizza. I loved that she was comfortable enough around me not to care if I saw her eating or not. Some chicks wouldn’t even eat a piece of lettuce in front of me.
I shrugged. “I was never home long enough to watch it, so there wasn’t any reason. I have killer internet service, though, and I can watch anything I want on these. Pick one.”
“I don’t know much about them, other than a lot of people Netflix and chill …”
I laughed when she broke off, blushing.