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  My phone dings not even a minute later.

  Yeah. Of course. If you want to talk, I’m here.

  Whoa. That’s kind of a strange offer. I set my phone face down on the couch and stare at a painting of a cat done in like, a thousand different colours. My sister likes stuff like this. Nice, bright, and cheery. I wonder what my own place will look like, and it’s a shock to think like that, considering I haven’t really even thought about it other than having those abstract apartments in mind. I’ve never had my own place. I moved out from my parent’s house right into Bryn’s. It was already decorated and I never really changed things up.

  Maybe it’s not a strange offer. My eyes flick to the cat’s nose. It’s painted bright blue for some reason. I don’t know. Trell, Bree, Arla, Jake, Karsyn, Bryn…we’ve all been friends since what feels like the dawn of time. I should be scrambling to fire off an explanation to Bree and Arla before they found out second hand, but I just can’t. Part of me says that it’s because it’s Christmas Eve and I don’t want them to worry. I don’t want to wreck their Christmas. Another part of me just doesn’t want to answer any questions at the moment. My sister and my parents are enough to deal with and I’m going to have to face them literally right away.

  I snatch my phone and type in a response.

  Thanks. I don’t know how to do this. Tell everyone. They’re going to know at the party. I have to face my family tonight. Are you busy tomorrow afternoon? I need a game plan. Bryn isn’t going to come up with one. He’ll save it all and drop it on everyone at the party. Will you meet with me to try and figure out what to do and how to tell everyone?

  My phone is silent for a few minutes. I can hear the kettle screaming away in the kitchen just behind the small living room. My eyes flick back the painting. One of the cat’s eyes is blue, the other is green. It’s surrounded by a meadow of black and white flowers, like it was too colorful for the rest of the world to be in anything but tones of grey.

  Finally, a few dots dance across the screen.

  Tomorrow at 2? Bobby’s and Beans?

  It’s kind of our friend group's designated hangout. The café is pretty hole in the wall, but they make really, really good coffee.

  Sounds good. Thanks, Trell. I can’t just leave it like that because I get this strange sensation in the pit of my stomach that I can’t fully explain. My emotions are a mess right now. I guess that’s as good an explanation as any. Thanks for having Bryn’s back when I can’t.

  My sister comes back with the mugs and thankfully my phone dings before she sets them down. I don’t want to have to check it once we start talking.

  No problem. See you tomorrow.

  Trell is just being a good friend. It’s not weird that I’m talking to him and not Bree or Arla. I’d be taking them away from their Christmases. Trell just has his mom, and I know they do their stuff early in the morning. He doesn’t even really like the holidays. I know I’m not imposing. That’s my only reason. That and he knows Bryn too. Bree and Arla do as well, but not like Trell does. I feel like I can get some good, honest advice from him. Like he’d be the most impartial and be in Bryn’s corner more than mine. And he was the one who reached out to me, after all.

  Taye sets down the two steaming mugs on the antique claw foot coffee table. She has doilies in three different colors, pink, yellow, and blue, set out. She’s wearing a bright red tunic with red and black striped tights and has a pair of flats on that are black cats. Black ears, whiskers, pink noses and all. She’s got big black and white striped hoop earrings on. Despite her rather strange taste in fashion and the fact that she likes to dye her hair a bright shade every few months—currently, it’s scarlet—she’s very conservative with her makeup. She hardly wears any. She’s very pretty, though, and doesn’t need it. She’s shaped like me. Curvy in the right places, but not as curvy as we’d probably like to be. She’s tall, like me. Unlike me, she doesn’t have to fake being comfortable in her own skin most of the time.

  “So?” Her dark brows pull together. They’re a little on the wild side, but she refuses to wax, tweeze, or do anything else to them. Taye’s always just been unapologetically who she is. Her dark eyes nail me to the spot. “What’s up with you and Bryn?”

  I heave a big sigh. God. This shouldn’t be so hard. I’ve had a year to practice in my head. Unfortunately, reality is a little different than the recordings in my brain.

  “How do you know somethings up?” It’s a stupid thing to say.

  Taye looks at me like it is too. Her full lips purse and she doesn’t blink. “You’re here. Without him. You’re here and not at Mom and Dad’s.” She sighs too, a big, drawn out sigh. “Come on, Cozzie. I know you guys haven’t been right for a long time. Are you…are you finally over?”

  I don’t even ask how she knows. She’s my sister. She probably just had to look at me. Or Bryn. He’s been in her life since she was twelve. She knows him like a brother. She could probably read both of us like really shitty open books.

  “Yeah,” I breathe.

  The room descends into silence for a few heartbeats. Taye doesn’t say anything and I don’t either. What is there to say other than that?

  Finally, she pushes my mug towards me. “It’s special. From the tea store. It’s called Christmas Cookie. You’ll like it. It’s sweet and spicy and I put cream in. It doesn’t even taste like tea, but you know what, it still is. And you know that I think that tea can make all your problems disappear.”

  I can’t help it. I sniffle and I have to reach up and brush a few tears from the corners of my stinging eyes. “I could really use that at the moment.”

  Taye smiles at me sadly. “I thought so.”

  Chapter 4

  Trell

  I’m an idiot. Of course Bobby’s and Beans isn’t open. It’s Christmas day. No other coffee shop is open in the entire city either, it seems.

  Cozzie gets the memo right around the same time her car pulls up next to mine. She unrolls her window and leans out, looking way too beautiful for someone who just got dumped. Maybe that’s not the right way to phrase it.

  She looks like she slept well. Her makeup, as always, is barely there and tasteful and just refines her beauty. Her lashes are so long that it makes her eyes look extra large, and they’re already swimming and luminous, a deep, soft brown. I know that she hates lipstick and that she likes tinted lip balm, so I know that’s what the soft shade of pink is on her full lips. Her curls are pulled back into a tight bun, which is a shame, because even though Bryn liked to bug her about her wild hair, I personally always liked the tight, corkscrew curls. She straightened it once, and her hair was a foot longer at least. I swear, I didn’t even recognize her.

  I recognize her now. She’s wearing a black cardigan over a green silk blouse. At least that’s all I can see of her as she leans out the window.

  “It’s closed,” I say stupidly. I wish that I didn’t always swallow my own tongue when Cozzie first appears on the scene.

  After a few minutes, I usually get used to her. Her sweet scent, something floral that I can’t identify because it’s probably an expensive perfume that is made to be intricate and exotic or a mix of perfume and shampoo and other products all mingled together. The way she carries her body like it’s lighter than air. She’s tall, but she’s still curvy, so maybe she actually feels that way. Essentially, she reminds me of sunshine, and like all sun, sometimes it hurts to look at her and I have to shade my eyes.

  “I should have figured. I guess I kind of…forgot that it was Christmas. No, I didn’t forget, I just…I don’t know.” She shakes her head and her curls stay tucked into her bun, which means she must have used a ton of product to keep them there.

  “I get it,” I push out roughly. I grip my steering wheel, my sweaty palms leaving damp marks. “Do you…” She waits for me to get my act together. More patient than I would be with me if I was her. I’m making things way the hell more awkward than they need to be. “Do you want to come over? We could ta
lk at my place, seeing as nothing else is open and I doubt you want to have this conversation standing at a gas station.”

  Her tongue darts out and wets her lips. My hands clench a little harder on the wheel, so that my knuckles go completely white.

  “Okay. I can meet you there.”

  It’s actually quite far, a thirty-minute drive even without traffic. I picked this place because I knew it was close to Cozzie’s parents, where she’s probably staying.

  “Sure.” The word comes out like glass scraping out of my throat.

  Cozzie blinks back at me. “You’ll have to give me the address.”

  Right. I don’t ever let anyone come over. Ever. The odds of me finding an abandoned building to take her to or a swamp or something are greater than me extending an offer to my place. If I race there ahead of her, maybe I’ll have five minutes to jam away all the shit I don’t want her to see and close the doors on the rooms that no one should know about.

  I rattle off the address, zip up the window before she has a chance to respond, and peel out of the parking lot. I figure I can get there at least ten minutes ahead. It’s not like I have bodies hidden anywhere or anything. Just a lot of shit that I’d rather people don’t know about me. It might sound crazy, but no one from our core group has ever asked to come over. I don’t invite. No one has seen my place. Everyone probably just assumes I live in a dump and it’s not fit for polite company. I’m perfectly okay with that assumption.

  What I’m not okay with is that the first person who is going to see it is going to be Cozzie. Cozzie Miller, the always off limits, my best friend’s girl, beautiful and enticing, mysterious, gorgeous, model-like Cozzie. She’s going to be in my house. Flooding it with her scent. Her light. Her presence and her very essence. Touching my furniture. Walking on my floor. Breathing the air that I’m breathing.

  Fuck.

  My cock hardens and kicks in my jeans and I nearly punch a hole through the windshield. I settle for grinding my teeth to powder and strangling the steering wheel instead.

  Confession time: I’m a piece of shit, the stinking kind of turd that mellows and never gets flushed down. The kind of disgusting turd that attracts the worst kind of flies. Bryn and Cozzie might have been faking it until they thought they could make it, but I’ve lied to my friends for years. About a lot of shit.

  I don’t work in finance. I don’t work in an office.

  And I’ve been in love with Cozzie Miller since I was sixteen years old.

  My foot hammers down the gas pedal and I really hope that there aren’t cops working on Christmas afternoon. I just need to make it to the house with enough time to take a few select paintings off the walls and jam them into all the rooms I’m going to close off. She can’t know. She can never know. If she sees those paintings, she’s going to understand.

  I can’t let her find out.

  A cold sweat breaks out over my skin, and by the time I reach my house, ram the car into gear and tear through the front door, I’m a wreck. I rip paintings off the walls left and right, carrying them down to the basement, since I figure that’s the safest bet, as there’s no way Cozzie would ever go down there.

  I actually have enough time not only to clear the walls, but to pick up takeout wrappers and old pizza boxes and make the place look habitable. By the time Cozzie’s car pulls up in the driveway, I’ve splashed cold water on my face, poured myself a glass of soda, and am composed as fuck.

  She can never find out.

  It was easier when she was with Bryn. There were boundaries, lines that I would never cross. I’m not into home wrecking. I would have suffered in silence and never said a thing. Ever. It’s different now that I know she’s single. Not that she’s really single. She’s fresh out of a relationship that lasted half her life. Although, the devil inside of me keeps prodding me with his nasty little pitchfork, reminding me that she hasn’t been happy for years. That Bryn told me that for the past year, they were sleeping in separate rooms, really little more than friends who were civil to each other.

  She might be fresh off of sliding that ring off her finger, but she’s probably moved on in her head. And that’s dangerous, because it’s all I can fucking think about as I pull the door open for her and invite her in.

  Cozzie glances around as though the place is actually a booby trapped snake den and one wrong move will spell out disaster for her. I don’t blame her. The house is a bungalow, one I renovated myself after I helped Bryn with his, so I was up to speed on how to do everything. It’s decent, though I didn’t open up all the walls like Bryn did. I left a little of the original character. I like things closed off. Compartmentalized. I need to do some of that at the moment. Compartmentalize my dick back into my pants and slam my feelings back down where they belong.

  Having Cozzie standing in my entrance, her eyes sweeping the walls and the non-descript black leather furniture, back to the walls, landing on some of the art I’ve purchased in the past years, is already doing things to me. And I’m never going to be able to un-see her standing there, her dark, flawless beauty flooding the place like a tide slowly creeping up, washing away everything in its wake.

  “Do you want coffee?” My voice is gruff. Too rough. Too hoarse. My friends might bug me for being a pretty bastard, at least that’s what they like to call me, but I don’t have the voice to match. It comes out extra-rough at the moment, sandpapery. “Of course you want coffee. You love coffee. You were going to meet me a damn coffee shop. Name your game and I’ll fix it up.”

  Cozzie stares at me like my forehead just opened up and gaze birth to an alien. “Uh, yeah, coffee would be great. Amazing, actually. But, like, anything?”

  I cross my arms over my chest, since I’m an asshole of the first degree and I know that with a tight black t-shirt on, it basically highlights the fact that I still work out faithfully and have the streamlined form of a natural born athlete. My parents might have made me too pretty, I could probably have had a modelling career if I wanted one with my baby face, but they got my height and stature right. People think twice about making jokes when it comes to my face, seeing as the rest of me looks significantly more dangerous.

  “Anything.”

  Cozzie shivers. I watch her do it. It sweeps through her, vibrating through her hands, which are locked together in front of her waist.

  I step down, since that anything wasn’t about the coffee and it’s bad enough my friends think I’m some kind of weirdo recluse who never invites anyone over and can never commit to a serious relationship—or any relationship.

  “Can you make a cappuccino? Strong enough to make up for the fact that I didn’t sleep at all last night?”

  “That bad?”

  “Yeah. It’s that bad. I doubt my parents did either. My sister was nice enough to let me stay with her, but I’m sure she didn’t appreciate the zombie walk routine I did between her living room and her kitchen all night. She probably didn’t sleep a wink.”

  “Isn’t that what Christmas Eve is for?”

  “Not in this case. No one felt very festive at my parents’ house this morning. Mom spent most of the morning hiding in the kitchen and bathroom, pretending like she wasn’t crying. Dad wasn’t much better. He looked like he was going to go out and bring Bryn’s carcass back and hang him on the wall. Taye, well, Taye was just Taye. She tried to hold it all together by being overly excited about all the gifts she got, even socks, then she insisted we all eat a huge lunch, even though none of us were hungry. I felt like I was right back to faking it again.”

  Cozzie looks miserable and it makes my stomach feel like I just munched down every single plate and bowl in the cupboard for lunch, so I throw up a palm, cutting her off. I’d rather she think I’m a douchebag who will listen to her and offer token advice, than a douchebag who cares too much.

  “Just hold that thought. Two cappuccinos coming right up. I have really dark, greasy beans or really dark, greasy beans.”

  “I’ll take the really dark, greasy be
ans.” Cozzie bends to unzip her boots and I take that as my cue to disappear.

  I hightail it to the kitchen and mask my panicked breathing with the sounds of the coffee grinder pulverizing beans to grounds. Making coffee drinks is a long ass process, with steaming the milk and everything and the machine is fussy. I’ve never been more thankful.

  I need time to get my shit together.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck, why did I have to fall for the wrong girl? Wrong, because she was never mine. Wrong, because she belonged to a guy I love like a brother. Wrong, because she’ll never think of me as anything more than her own pseudo brother. I could have my pick of pretty much any woman out there, and I’ve always wanted the wrong one.

  Now that I know it’s off with her and Bryn, the evil, asshole version of me is coming out and my shady doppelganger isn’t getting the memo that Cozzie has zero interest in me and will never have any interest in me. It doesn’t matter if she’s single for two minutes or two years, she’s never going to want me that way.

  Too bad my dick didn’t get the memo. The bastard is so hard that it hurts. I could likely hand it the instruments to make the coffee and it would do a fine job. At least if I needed to hang something up. I briefly think about cock punching myself, just to deflate my dick, but I settle for adjusting myself in my jeans before I finish off the cappuccinos.

  When I stroll back into the living room and set the mugs down on the only piece of furniture I actually bothered with spending money on, a coffee table that is made to look like it once had a past life as a railroad cart, Cozzie is sitting on the couch. It sags in the middle, where she is, since the springs are broken there, but I’m single and it’s only me and I don’t sit there, so I haven’t replaced it.

  She’s got her long legs folded and thank god she’s wearing leggings under that tunic, because it’s ridden up so high it would kill me on the spot to look at her if she wasn’t fully clothed. The green silk compliments her dark mocha skin and her jet black curls. I love when she wears color. Bright color. Deep color. Any color. It all looks incredible on her. Actually, I think a garbage bag would look like haute couture on her.