“Okay.”
“Came over because you never replied to my text.”
“There was nothing to say.”
“I see.”
“Do you? Because I doubt you’d be over here if you did,” he said. “Weren’t you the one who told me not to seek you out, and you’d do the same?”
“You picked a hell of a time to listen to anything I had to say,” I told him.
"I always was a slow learner when it came to subjects I hated.”
“If you hate it so much, talk to me and tell me why you pulled the shit you did backstage?”
“Habit,” he replied. “Anytime I’ve got a good thing going, I have to wreck it.”
Now he was starting to piss me off again. “Tell me you have a better excuse than that.”
“Not one you’d want to hear.”
“Try me,” I insisted because damn, I deserved way better than that lame-ass, cliché excuse.
He huffed and rested his elbows on the table, propped his head on his hands, and glared across the table at me. “It doesn’t even matter now, so why don’t you drop it?”
“Because you fucking wormed your way into my heart, you little shit, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to get you out of my system and off my mind until you tell me why the fuck you didn’t just walk away when I asked you to.”
“Well, let’s see,” he began. “I’m kind of an asshole, a bit of a dick, and I didn’t want to go to the afterparty. I wanted you, and when you said no, it felt like you were rejecting me, and I wasn’t in the right headspace for it. Everything was bright and loud, and I kind of needed you to pin me down until everything leveled out again. I get why you couldn’t. It just sucked and pissed me off. After I saw your text, I realized that you were right. We aren’t the right fit for one another. I’m needy and can be a bit of a brat. You’ve got a job to do and don’t have time for all that. I just didn’t realize how little you really thought of me until the night you jumped my shit about Kit. For the record, I had absolutely nothing to do with that.”
Yeah, that hadn’t been one of my finer moments. “I know; Iasked around.”
“Because you didn’t trust me to tell you the truth.”
“You have to admit that people trusting you doesn’t exactly work out well for them,” I reminded him. “Cyril is stuck guarding the semis indefinitely because he trusted you to do as you were told and make sure he was with you before you went running off somewhere, and you couldn’t even be bothered to do that.”
“Look, this whole thing hasn’t exactly been easy for me,” he said. “I was the grungy metal kid that just happened to be good at hockey, so I was tolerated, for the most part. Most likely to need a bodyguard was never on my bingo card, so it’s taking some adjustment.”
“I can appreciate that,” I replied. “What I can’t wrap my head around is why you feel the need to be so self-destructive in the process. Climbing down your balcony. Bribing strangers to let you pass through to the hallway? That’s not a normal level of avoidance, even if your plan was to get laid.”
He just cocked his head and raised an eyebrow at me. “Dude, not normal is par for the course with me. My mama didn’t name me Rebel. I earned that.”
“Does she still call you by your given name, or has even she given up and started calling you Rebel?"
“To be fair, it started out as Rebel Roy since I wasn’t the only Roy in my tiny circle of friends. By the time the other one moved to Fall River and wasn’t around as much anymore, it was just Rebel, and it’s been Rebel ever since.”
“Doesn’t mean you have to go out of your way to prove how much of one you can be.”
“Doesn’t it, though?”
“I’m still not buying it,” I replied. “I’m sure that’s part of the story, but you’re still not being completely straight with me.”
His snickering didn’t help my already frayed emotions, nor did the way he scoffed and raised an eyebrow at me. “I haven’t been completely straight since I went skinny dipping with the Louden twins and realized I was way more interested in watchingJoey than Lillian.”
“Now you’re just giving me shit.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I just don’t see the point in any of this when you made your position very clear,” he replied.
“In other words, you don’t want to be vulnerable and admit the truth because you don’t feel like there’s anything to gain in doing so,” I surmised.