AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I swallowed, because her voice—soft and throaty—had the same effect on me as it had in my kitchen when I was nineteen.
“I want to talk to you,” I said.
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. See you never, she had said in that same voice, the one I wanted to hear again.
“How the hell do you know where I live?” she asked.
I didn’t move, even though I was being soaked with cold drizzle. We both were. “Invite me in and I’ll tell you.”
“I’m not inviting you anywhere.”
I shrugged. “Then I guess you’ll never know.” My gaze moved to her hair. “You lost the red.”
She blinked, surprise crossing her expression before she shut it down. She hadn’t been sure that I remembered her, either. Did she think it was possible I’d forgotten? “That was a long time ago,” she said.
“Not so long, really,” I said.
She shook her head. “You shouldn’t be here, Finn.”
I looked patiently up at the darkening sky. “It’s raining. On both of us.”
She licked her bottom lip, just a swift glimpse of her tongue telling me that she was as unsure in this moment as I was. That she felt something, even if I wasn’t quite sure what it was.
She hesitated another moment while both of us got wet. Then she took her keys out of her pocket and stepped toward me.
“I guess this is never,” she said. “Come in.”
“This isn’t your kind of place,” she said in the silence of the elevator.
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
Juliet rolled her eyes. The doors opened, and she motioned to the dim hallway of her rental building, the worn carpet, the cheap fluorescent lights. “Come on. Don’t play stupid.”
Even though I had insisted on carrying her bag for her, she thought I was a rich snob. A fair assumption. I certainly was rich, not by Bill Gates standards but by anyone else’s. My wool coat was expensive. I had just bought a Gibson on impulse without thinking of the price.
But a snob? I didn’t think so, but how would I know? The set of Juliet’s jaw, the way she kept her gaze ahead as if she was slightly embarrassed, said that she had made up her mind. I filed that information away. Maybe it would help me get what I wanted. If she wanted a rich snob, I could give her one.
Inside the apartment, a woman sat on the sofa, watching TV and eating pad Thai from a takeout container. She looked up at us.
“This is my roommate, Amara,” Juliet said as she took off her sneakers and hung her jacket on a hook. “This is Finn.”
“Hi,” I said politely, nodding as I took off my boots. “Nice to meet you. Sorry about the confusion over the intercom.”
Amara frowned. She narrowed her eyes—she knew me from somewhere, but she couldn’t place where. “It’s fine,” she said, giving up in apathy, and she turned back to her dinner and the TV.
“What confusion?” Juliet asked, her voice sharp.
“I told her I knew you,” I explained. “It didn’t get me in the door.”
Amara didn’t answer. She had decided I was too boring to acknowledge any longer.
Juliet gave her roommate a long look. She had said This is Finn, along with me showing my face, and the other woman hadn’t put it together. Maybe she didn’t know who Finn Wiley was. If she did, she hadn’t expected him to appear in her living room one random day after work. I got that a lot. People saw my face and wondered if they had gone to school with me, or if I had played on their softball team or something. It took them a minute to realize they had sung along with “Ice Cream Girlfriend” a long time ago, then never thought of me again.
I looked around the small apartment. There was nowhere private for Juliet and me to talk. Well, nowhere except one room.
Juliet thought of it the same time I did, and she scowled. “Follow me.”
Her bedroom was small, with a double bed, a dresser, a messy closet, and—of course—an amp in the corner. It wasn’t hooked up to anything. Juliet had stacked books on it: Keith Richards’s memoir and Debbie Harry’s memoir, both well-thumbed, with A Court of Thorns and Roses on top. God, this woman. She had me in a chokehold already.
