Nothing. Not even blinking dots.
Fine. He could carry the conversation all on his own, because that was how charming and efficient he was.
Wait, what am I saying? Marcus is the nice one. OF COURSE you like him. He frowned, struck by a sudden thought. But not more than you like me. Right?
He waited, drumming his knuckles against the duvet.
Right, Lauren? he added after another minute.
No answer. No dots.
Alex huffed out an aggrieved breath through his nose and switched to all caps to relieve his feelings. GAH, YOU ARE THE WORST.
Marcus reentered the room then, shoulders slumped, an abandoned kitten once more.
Dammit. Back to the plan. “How long does it take to get ice? Did you personally trek to the arctic tundra and cut the cubes yourself?”
“The machine is on the other side of the …” Marcus sighed. “Never mind. I’m sorry I took so long.”
A quiet ding signaled a new email in Alex’s personal account. Maybe Lauren had responded that way instead of texting, for whatever reason?
But no, it was an email from the last person he wanted writing him. Dammit.
“Fuck,” Alex groaned, then tapped the email to open it. “I have a new message from Ron and R.J. The subject line is Inappropriate behavior and possible consequences. As if I don’t know what horrible things they could—”
Wait.
No. No, that couldn’t be right. Alex had been skimming and distracted, and he must have read it wrong. Ron was an asshole, sure, but Lauren was his goddamn cousin.
A second reading didn’t change anything.
After chastising Alex for unacceptable rudeness to that terrible fan yesterday, and yammering about how his behavior was in violation of behavioral expectations and contractual obligations—nothing Alex hadn’t read before, and nothing that bothered him, given the context of said rudeness—Ron had added a postscript.
P.S. I suppose this is our fault, for saddling you with such an ugly minder. Tell Lauren to put a bag over it, if she has to, but stop letting her face get you in trouble. Although that doesn’t fix the rest of her, right?
Ron had added a crying-laughter emoji at the end.
He’d also cc’d Lauren.
There was no misinterpreting that.
Alex’s skull began pounding, and annihilating rage detonated within him, sweeping unbearable heat over his entire, rigid body.
“Those motherfuckers,” he whispered. “Those cruel motherfuckers.”
That awful woman from yesterday had deserved what she’d gotten from Alex, but she was just an entitled, pissed-off stranger. Not worth thinking about for longer than it took to verbally smack her down.
This—
This, he couldn’t abide. Not for a single minute. Not for a second.
That fucking emoji. That careless amusement at Lauren’s expense, with Lauren as the fucking audience. All that, after Ron dared to call her—Wren, the woman with the most beautiful eyes imaginable, his fucking cousin—ugly?
No fucking way Alex was going to stand for that. She’d tell him to let it go, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t.
No one, fucking no one, was going to mistreat a woman he—
Not again. He was not fucking allowing it again.
His hard, heaving breaths hurt his chest, and his vision had turned so hazy, he didn’t even see his best friend approaching the bed. Marcus removed the phone from Alex’s clenched hand and said something, but all that blood pounding in Alex’s ears muffled the words, and his brain was pinballing in a million different directions, too many to make sense of anything but the imperative hammering against his cranium.
Fix this. Fix this now.
A walk, he finally managed to decipher. Marcus wanted to go for a walk.
Oh, Alex would walk, all right. Right to a fucking stage, and a fucking microphone.
“No time.” Alex’s joints ached as if with fever, but he stood and shoved on his shoes, then stalked to the door. “Let’s get going. I have a Q-and-A session to attend. You can keep the phone for now.”
He could barely hear his own words over his freight-train heartbeat.
Marcus slipped the cell into his front pocket, right next to his crotch, but Alex didn’t give a shit. He didn’t need a phone to do what was right.
Fix this. Fix this now.
It was a howl in his brain, driving him inexorably onward, and vaguely, he acknowledged Marcus saying things to people, maybe fans, but he couldn’t focus on them over all the noise.
When the moderator and conference organizers greeted Alex and Marcus at the assigned hall, he grappled for enough self-control to be polite, because none of this was their fault.