“Not weird like that,” she says, her voice high-pitched. Her paranoia practically ekes through the phone line. Her breathing shallows for a second.
“Hey,” I snap. “Have you taken Ambien tonight?”
She clears her throat to calm down. “I will after I get off the phone.”
“Fucking promise me.”
“I fucking promise you,” she says. I hear the smile in her voice.
There’s a soft knock on the door frame to my bedroom. I look up. Emilia stands there, wearing one of my T-shirts. It barely covers her thighs. “Towels?” she whispers.
I point to the hall closet, and she tiptoes there, my shirt riding up to her waist. I don’t look at her bare ass. Mostly because it feels like I’m cheating on Daisy. The guilt just keeps on coming.
I wait for Emilia to return to my room so she can’t hear my conversation. I’ve been in the media long enough to know that friends can fuck you over quickly. Strangers even faster. Eavesdropping on one of my conversations and selling whatever the fuck I said to a magazine was the easiest paycheck five of my old college friends have ever made.
I don’t necessarily hate them. I just don’t go on snowboarding trips and to birthday fucking parties when I’m invited anymore. Two years ago, when the Calloway girls, my brother and Connor were swept up into this publicity mess, I realized we had to band together to survive. From that moment, I knew it was going to be hard trusting anyone beyond the six of us. How can you when a simple fact like I hate Justin Bieber could be worth a grand to a magazine?
The phone line is quiet.
“You still there?” I ask Daisy.
“Yeah.” She pauses. “I don’t want to ruin your time with your…date. We’ll talk later.”
“Fuck that,” I tell her. I haven’t been able to get Daisy on the phone in days. She won’t even let me look at her face. I have no idea the amount of sleep she’s been actually getting. I just want to make sure she’s okay. “What was weird about tonight?”
“You really don’t want to know.”
“Now I really fucking do.”
She lets out a short breath. “I saw Connor’s penis.”
What? “Excuse me?”
“I was looking at porn, and I accidentally stumbled upon Rose and Connor’s sex tape. Hence, his penis. To think, I managed to dodge the explicit version for a whole year. I thought I was going to get away without seeing it forever.”
I lean back against my couch and pinch the bridge of my nose in a cringe. Not a lot can make Connor Cobalt fucking uncomfortable, but learning that his girlfriend’s little sister saw him having sex—that may do it. My face has hardened in a wince.
And I have a hard time imagining her seeing anyone’s dick but mine. Nausea barrels through me.
“Are you going to say something?” she asks.
“I haven’t even seen those videos.”
“Jealous?”
“Not in the fucking slightest,” I tell her. The shower turns on, the pipes groaning through the walls. I glance at my closed bedroom door and then back at the floorboards. “Daisy, you weren’t looking at porn to try and fall asleep, were you?” It’s a fucking path that no one would want her to go down.
“No…” She sounds like she has something else to add, so I wait for her to speak again. I can hear her shifting on her bed. “I had a guy over tonight.”
The temperature drops ten degrees. My head is fucking submerged beneath an ocean again, that gritty salt water sliding down my throat. I see an older guy fucking the hell out of her, and I almost kick the coffee table. I calm down with a deep breath. “Yeah?” I run my hand through my hair a couple times, messing up the already disheveled strands.
“Yeah,” she says, leaving it at that.
“Did you look at porn together?” I shoot up to my feet and head to the fucking kitchen, the phone to my ear with one hand. I open the fridge, nothing in there but a case of water and a leftover sub from Lucky’s. Don’t punch the fucking wall.
“That would definitely be another weird thing for the night, but no, we didn’t watch it together.”
“Is he still there?” Don’t fucking think about it. I open the freezer to distract me. It’s just as bare as the fridge. A package of freezer-burnt chicken and a tray of ice. In the last four months, I’ve spent almost no time in my apartment. Maybe to grab some clean clothes and my climbing gear. Other than that, I’ve been at Daisy’s place.