Page 74 of Their Wicked Ways

14

EZRA

I foundJett standing in our living room, looking like he was trying to melt into the floor.

“Hey.” His eyes darted around nervously.

Something about seeing him in one of my old hoodies and a pair of Wes’s sweats made my stomach flip-flop.

“Hey.” I sank down on our worn sofa and pointed to the ancient easy chair across from me. “Make yourself comfortable.”

He crept over to the chair and gingerly perched on it. “This is a nice place. I was looking for something like this, an apartment in a house, but the only ones I could find in my price range were run down and gross.”

“It’s a tough market out there. We lucked out when we found this place.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Almost four years.”

A small smile tilted the corners of his mouth. “For some reason I pictured this place looking different.”

I chuckled. “What did you think it would look like?”

He smiled, a real one that reached his eyes. “Like River and Zane’s place. Have you been over there?”

I shook my head.

“Zane’s organized and River isn’t, so their apartment is half messy, half tidy, like they split each room down the middle. It reminds me of what my brothers and I used to do, only it’s their whole apartment.”

“Wes would one hundred percent be all over that if he saw it,” I said with a low laugh.

“I’d be all over what?” Wes asked from the doorway.

“Me.” I tossed a smirk at him.

He snickered. “No lies detected.”

Grinning, I stood and walked over to him so I could deliver a little smack to his ass. “Damn straight.”

He yelped and danced away from me.

“I’ll be out in a few,” I said, heading out of the living room as Wes went to sit in my vacated seat.

Once I was in the bathroom, I took a lightning-fast shower. The only thing I didn’t like about the apartment was that the water heater for our floor was tiny and took forever to refill. Three showers was pushing its limits, and I wasn’t in the mood to get blasted by freezing cold water. Especially now that I’d come and didn’t need to cool off.

When I was done, I pulled the door to the bathroom open and headed back to the living room where Wes and Jett were laughing about something, the mood in the room light and relaxed.

Jett stopped laughing as soon as he saw me.

I tried not to take it personally that he didn’t seem able to relax around me. Wes had a way about him that put people at ease. He was open and friendly and radiated kindness. I had resting bitch face and didn’t suffer fools well, as my parents would say, so I was far less approachable and tended to give off asshole vibes.

Not breaking stride, I sat next to Wes on the couch.

He pressed his leg against mine and rested his hand on my thigh. “I was just telling Jett about when we first moved in and didn’t have blinds or anything yet, and you gave the couple across the street an eyeful when you took a shower that night. And every night until we covered it up.”

“Yeah, that was my bad.” I smirked. “But in my defense, they were the ones who kept looking, so who’s really the weird one? The guy taking a shower in his own home, or the ones peeping in his window? And it’s not my fault they didn’t learn their lesson the first time and kept looking until they couldn’t.”

Jett snickered. “I had neighbors like that.”