Page 80 of Broken Romeo
That smile and those lips and, fuck me, that body… there was no way I could walk away from this girl now. Not after having one taste.
She blinked, regarding me carefully, saying, “That was… wow.”
I swallow hard, doing my best to gulp down and bury the torrent of emotion swirling through me.
“Is it always that good?” she asked. It was a seemingly innocent question, but the gleam in her eyes told me she knew exactly what she was doing.
I thought back to my first kiss in high school. A sloppy mash of lips and tongues. I remembered my chin being wet at the end of it. It’s rarely this good, I wanted to answer. Even with the hundreds of kisses I’d had, I couldn’t remember a time when one had knocked me down like that.
“No,” I said, my voice hoarse. “I guess you’re just a natural.”
She laughed, her tongue trailing across her bottom lip as though she could taste remnants of my lips on hers.
“Thank you,” she whispered. And with another shy, quick smile over her shoulder, she walked out of my room.
Leaving me alone.
Wanting.
Needy.
And totally ruined.
CHAPTER TWENTY
My parents would eat her alive, he had written in his journal.
He wasn’t wrong. They did… or at least, they tried to. But what Holden didn’t know at the time was how resilient I was to not being “enough” in the eyes of parents, peers, and friends.
My parents are good people and hard workers and had built our life from almost nothing. But as the daughter of the man who owned the only dive bar in town, it wasn’t just Dad’s business that was seen as seedy… it was our whole family.
Which was why my parents were so damn protective. Why they worked so hard to keep a clean image of our family. Why we had to wake up every Sunday and attend church amidst the whispers.
So, when Holden’s dad tried to make me feel like gum on the bottom of his shoe, it didn’t bother me. I was used to it.
What did bother me was Holden’s reaction to them.
“Excuse me?”
I blink, glancing up from Holden’s journal to find an impatient customer staring at me, tapping their foot from the other side of the register.
Shit. It’s been a slow morning at the café, so I’ve been doing some reading before my rehearsal. Closing the journal, I tuck it under the counter and smile at the woman, saying, “Sorry about that. What can I get you?”
“A cold brew, please.”
Perfect. Easy and fast to make.
I grab a plastic cup from the stack and scoop some ice into it before pouring our cold brew coffee.
The bells on the door jingle as Curt comes strolling in fifteen minutes late. As the manager, shouldn’t he at least be on time for his shifts? How many times has he lectured me if I was literally one minute late? I bite the inside of my cheek, suppressing the urge to scream at him and instead, settle on a simple, “You’re late.”
He shrugs as I hand the woman her drink. She gives me a tight smile as she drops fifty cents in the tip jar. I’ll take it. A fifty-cent tip is better than no tip.
“Yeah, yeah,” Curt mumbles and opens the register. Grabbing an envelope tucked beneath the tray, he opens it and flips through the paychecks inside, handing me mine.
I sigh in relief and clutch it to my chest. This, combined with my savings and my first paycheck I got yesterday for week one of rehearsals has me more than halfway there to pay back Ms. Greene. One more week of rehearsals and I’ll almost make it to three thousand bucks. I just might pull this off, after all.
I grab my bag and shove Holden’s journal inside when Curt extends a second card toward me.