“Homophobic?” I wonder, dunking a chip in salsa. I didn’t really peg my half-brother to be like that.
“No,” Ryke snaps like that’s the furthest from the truth. “Just irritated.”
I think he’s just jealous of the relationship I have with Connor. It’s simple. We’re friends. But with Ryke—it just…it can’t be like that. There’s too much shit between us for it to be anything other than complicated.
Ryke takes out his phone and texts someone before setting his cell on the table near mine. When the waitress returns, we place our orders, and then three girls giggle loudly at the bar. They notice us in the back and smack each other’s arms. I read their lips: that’s them.
All wear themed sorority shirts like Go Greek! and Tri and Beat Us with running shorts. In their twenties—the kind of girls that go to the college I was expelled from.
University of Pennsylvania.
Ryke openly checks the girls out, and they nearly shriek, their eyes bulging.
“You’d think that you just gave them a ride in your Maserati,” I say to my brother.
“I don’t own a Maserati.” It was a figure of speech. He stands up and tosses his napkin on the chair. “Give me five minutes.”
Connor pockets his phone. “That long?”
“Fuck off,” Ryke says easily before leaving to approach the girls.
I think the redhead on the end is going to faint.
They practically bounce on their bar stools, and Ryke slides in, using whatever game he has to pick them up. The short blonde with dark red lipstick speaks to Ryke, but she points right at Connor.
“Looks like one of them is into you,” I tell Connor.
He waves to them in the most noncommittal way I’ve ever seen. Friendly, not like a brush off, but half-removed like he’s silently disinterested.
“Cobalt,” Ryke shouts. “They want to know your IQ.”
“Higher than yours.”
Ryke rolls his eyes and turns his back on us, still talking to them.
“What a pickup line,” I say. “Damn, I missed the chance to use it on you.” When I first met him, I was sure he was asexual. Lily suspected that he was gay. Now, I honestly don’t even know what he is.
To me—he’s just Connor.
Maybe that’s the point.
“I wouldn’t have turned you down.” Connor leans back in his chair, checking his gold and black plated watch.
“Why is that?”
“You’re good looking,” he banters. “Not as good looking as me, but no one really is. So I wouldn’t count that against you.”
Before I was sober, I’d sit at a bar with Connor and people would fawn over him. Six-foot-four with those obnoxiously confident blue eyes.
Connor Cobalt is catnip for pussy and cock.
He knows it and he almost just doesn’t care.
Turns out Connor does have a type, and she happens to be strutting through the restaurant right now. I let out an audible groan when I hear her five-inch heels and see her piercing yellow-green eyes. But Rose has zoned in on one person.
She raises her Chanel sunglasses to the top of her head, and then occupies Ryke’s seat next to Connor. He greets her with a few words in French, and she replies back in the same language. His arm slides around the back of her chair, his body leaned towards her in possession.
If the girls at the bar didn’t realize he was legitimately taken, they do now.
“Hey, Rose,” I say unenthusiastically. “I thought you couldn’t make it to lunch.”
“I have ten minutes,” she says, flagging down the waitress. “I thought I’d stop by just to piss you off. It’s number three on my list of daily activities.”
“Thought so,” I say. “Is filing your talons number four?”
She shoots me a glare.
I shoot one back.
“Children,” Connor says, “can you fight while Rose isn’t near knives and Loren isn’t near tables that he can flip? I find cafeteria brawls wildly amusing, but not when I’m in the crossfire.”
“You’ve been saved,” Rose tells me like a villain in a bad action flick. She’s half-serious which is the stupid thing.
“Thank you, Darth Vader.”
She flips me off, just as the waitress approaches and clears her throat. Rose is caught with her middle finger in the air.
I laugh—this is rich.
Rose looks hardly embarrassed. She lowers her finger and says, “I’d like a margarita, frozen, no salt.”
“Can I see your ID?”