Page 9 of Meet Hate Love
I ducked off the busy sidewalk and into the Electric Iguana. Lively mariachi music replaced the hum of traffic.
Theo sat at our usual booth in the back, his fingers going wild over his phone. “Why are the hot ones always so insane?” he mumbled, glancing up from the device when I took a seat in the booth across from him. “Hey, man.”
A new string of messages dinged his phone.
Groaning, he dragged his hands through his short-cropped hair, then placed the device facedown beside the basket of tortilla chips.
“Who have you pissed off now, Theo?”
“Number Nine.” He took the salt and dumped it over the chips.
“You don’t even know her name?”
Theo had to be the biggest manwhore to walk the streets of Manhattan. Nevertheless, women—including “number nine”—couldn’t seem to get enough of him.
“Why in the hell do girls fool with you?”
“I’m irresistible.”
I snorted. “You’re an asshole.”
“Me? I’ve never had a girl give me a black eye for trying to kiss her,” he said, cramming a handful of chips into his mouth.
That was right. The reason Blake had punched me on New Year’s Eve was that I’d tried to kiss her. Does it sound extreme? Yes, but it was Blake we were talking about. I’d worked on the other side of the cubicle from her long enough to know she was anything but reasonable. She was a ball of uncontained chaos bottled in a curvy, five-foot-one frame. She reacted first. Thought later.
She had an irrational fear of pigeons. She hated shrimp and loved lo mein. She preferred to read smutty romance and occasionally a Stephen King novel.Dumb and Dumberwas her all-time favorite movie, and she could quote every single line. And even though she’d nailed me in the eye, I couldn’t help but have a thing for her.
“I still stand by the fact that had you gone in for the fuck instead of a smoochy-smoochy, she wouldn’t have punched you.”
Because a man attempting to kiss a woman he barely knows was more insulting than him trying to fuck her? “You’re an idiot.”
He scooped half of the cheese dip onto a chip. “I’ve told you my go-to line with a girl is, ‘It’s okay, baby, I heard you were easy.’ Do they get pissed? Yes. Do they leave all huffy and puffy? Yes. Do they call me the next day?” He lifted a brow before stuffing the chips into his mouth. “You bet your raw dick they do.”
The man had zero morals, and I often questioned what kind of person I was since he was not only my roommate but my chosen best friend.
I reached for the chips. “You realize you are the definition of an asshole?”
“Confucksius says, ‘To get one’s dick sucked, he must first be a dick.’”
And maybe that was my problem. I didn’t just want my dick sucked. The whole one-night stand and short-lived relationships had grown old a long time ago. I wanted a girl I could wake up next to, drink coffee with, a girl who would laugh so hard at sophomoric humor she’d snort.
I wanted someone to share experiences outside of the bedroom with.
* * *
Halfway through my fajita,Number Nine showed up at the Electric Iguana and slammed a positive pregnancy test on the table in front of Theo.Needless to say, I took my plate to the bar, asked for a to-go bag, and left Theo to that clusterfuck.
Maybe it made me a bad friend, but Theo tended to go after girls who liked to break things. Last summer, one of his fuck-buddies chucked a bear he’d won for her at Coney Island into our sink, then set it on fire. Before I could grab the fire extinguisher, the cabinets had been scorched. Theo had sworn he had no clue what had sent her over the edge. My guess? He’d given her the impression things were more serious than they were. He always did that.
I finished my food in the park and grabbed a thesaurus from a corner market—the next time Blake came at me with her over-the-top words, I would come prepared. Then I went back to the office.
As soon as I’d sat down at my desk, my gaze narrowed on the lone piece of hole punch paper by my keyboard. My lips quirked at the memory of Blake losing it yesterday and chucking a barrage of office supplies over the cubicle wall. I swept the dot of paper into my hand. When I turned in my chair to toss it into the trash, Blake stood at the copier a few feet away. My gaze drifted from the dark waves of hair trailing down her back to her ass.
The stack of papers on the edge of the machine fell to the floor, and when she bent down to collect them, I bit my lip. I liked to think I was above primal urges, but the way the blood flow shifted to my dick was proof I absolutely was not. Not with her, at least.
A text dinged my phone, dragging my attention away from Blake and her perfect ass.
Dude. A baby? WTF am I supposed to do?
