Page 15 of Filthy Beautiful
Because it’s fucking fun.
Shit. Who was the grownup here?
Cary’s little sister was twelve fucking years younger than me. Old enough to vote and fuck whoever she wanted, sure. But she’d graduated high school like a month ago and she couldn’t even drink (legally). She was still halfway a kid and I was acting like one.
Fuck, she brought it out in me, though.
I wandered over to her bookcase. Tapped my knuckle against the spines of her books. Required reading for school, maybe, because who read this stuff for fun?Gone with the Wind… Great Expectations… Wuthering Heights…All these tragic love stories were mixed in with biographies of everyone from Einstein to Hitler to Amelia Earhart.
“A little light reading?”
“Some of us like our reading materials to have actual words in them.”
I glanced at her. “Guess there’s no point in telling you those magazines aren’t mine.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re right. No point at all.”
“Dean came by.”
She shifted. It was subtle, but she dropped the attitude maybe one degree. “When?”
“Last night.”
“To see Cary?”
“Uh-huh.”
She pressed her lips together.
“You haven’t seen Cary lately?” I ventured.
“A couple of weeks ago,” she muttered, not looking at me. And I could see how that bugged her. Just like it did when I told her I’d seen Cary on the weekend.
Couldn’t blame her for that. And I didn’t love that it put that look on her face and Cary wasn’t here to see it. That he didn’t even think about how it might hurt her when me and Dean got to see him, and she didn’t.
“We’re just checking in on him,” I offered. “You know… Everyone’s back from tour, just want to make sure he’s okay.”
It was true. He wasn’t okay. But at least we were checking in.
The usual.
“I appreciate it,” she forced out. Her pretty features hardened as she tried to look like it didn’t bother her as much as it did.
And suddenly I felt like a total dick standing here in her room, making her uncomfortable.
There was a line, even for a guy like me.
“I’ll, uh, let you unpack.”
She didn’t look at me as I made my exit.
I went back out to the poolhouse and started unpacking my shit from the garbage bags. I tossed Dean’s “gifts” right back in, arranging my own stuff back in the drawers. The whole place smelled like lemons and lavender. At least I’d gotten a partial cleaning out of it. I didn’t usually let Cary’s housekeeper clean up after me much, because I knew he’d pay for it.
What was Courteney doing here, anyway?
Trying to move into the poolhouse, with so much of her stuff…?
I wondered, as I got settled into the poolhouse—again—if maybe I should bring a few more things over from my place. I’d only brought enough for maybe a week. When I’d showed up on the weekend, I didn’t really know how long I’d be here this time. Figured I’d stay for a few days, then go back and forth between here and my place.
