RONAN (The Wolf Hotel)

“Ready?” Connor hollers from the living room.

I grab my wallet and keys from the top of my dresser. I don’t know why I even bother with my keys. I’m always with Connor. We’ve become attached at the hip.

Ryan’s door opens just as I’m stepping out of my bedroom. It’s the first I’ve seen of her since our 2:00 a.m. confrontation on Friday night. It’s now Sunday night. “Hey, what time do you need the shower in the morning?” she asks, not a hint of the usual venom in her voice.

“My alarm goes off at 6:20.”

“Great. Have a good night.” She ducks into her room and closes the door without another word.

All right then….

Maybe she’s learning how to deal with her heartache.

Maybe she isn’t such a shrew, after all.

~ ~ ~ ~

I knock on the bathroom door. It’s six thirty. She knew I needed to hop in the shower ten minutes ago in order to get to work on time. So why the hell did I hear the shower start at six fifteen?

This is intentional.

And she’s not answering.

I bang on the door. “Come on, Ryan!”

Connor staggers into the kitchen, a little rough around the eyes after our late night at the bar down the street, watching the game. But he’s clean and in uniform, coffee in hand, ready to go. “What’s goin’ on?”

“Your sister is being as sweet as ever, that’s what’s goin’ on.” She’s gonna make me late.

“Use my bathroom.”

I’m about to concede, but…. “No! Fuck this!” I like my razor and my shampoo and my soap. She’s just doing this to piss me off. I pound on the door. “If you don’t answer me in five seconds, I’m gonna assume you’ve slipped and fallen, and I’m gonna kick this door down! Consider this fair warning. One! Two! Three!—”

The shower shuts off.

Seconds later, the door opens and Ryan steps out, still in her pajamas, her hair dry, a book tucked under her arm.

What the…. “You didn’t even take a shower.”

She lets out an exaggerated yawn. “Oops! Silly me, I can’t believe I forgot to actually get in!”

I feel my face screw up. “You forgot to get in?”

She shrugs innocently.

“And let me guess: you forgot that I needed to shower for work at 6:20 a.m., like I told you yesterday when you asked?”

“Whoops! Totally slipped my mind. I guess I was just so tired after losing all that sleep this weekend. You know, with all the whores.”

“That was just Friday night. And they’re weren’t whores!”

She strolls past me and into her room, kicking the door shut behind her.

I turn to Connor, who’s devouring a banana and grinning. “Is she for real? Did that just happen?”

“You two kids better figure out how to get along. And hurry up. We’ve gotta go soon.”

Fuck. I duck into the bathroom and turn on the tap. I wait for the hot water.

But there’s none left.

~ ~ ~ ~

“It’s impossible to get kicked out of Sin!” Dean, a lanky guy, exclaims around a mouthful of his sub sandwich, thin strands of shredded lettuce spilling out of his mouth as he talks.

“And yet superstar here managed it, all by himself.” Connor’s heavy hand falls on my shoulder. “I can’t decide if it was the blow job or the fact that you started to finger the cocktail waitress that pissed the bouncers off more.”

A raucous chorus of applause and laughter erupts in the staff area behind the Wolf hotel—a simple fenced-off area of picnic tables and a few planters—as the guys we’re taking our lunch break with react to Connor’s retelling of Friday night.

“And then what happened?” Lopez, a short Hispanic guy from customer service whose first name evades me, asks. He seems like a decent guy. The kind of guy who still lives at home and does everything his mother asks him to do, including marry the good Catholic girl from down the street that she approves of. I’m guessing she wouldn’t approve of him sitting with our lot.

“We left.” I ball up the wrapper of my own sandwich and chuck it into the trash can, then lean back on the park bench and revel in the warm sun. Unlike Connor, I’m not one to fuck around and talk about it.

“Yeah, but—”

“Come on, now.” I nod toward a group of female employees sitting at the table next to us, pretending not to listen. They don’t need to hear a bunch of pigheaded crew guys talking about blow jobs and fingering.

“And then we swapped,” Connor goes on to say. “And damn, did that girl know how to suck a cock.”

“So you basically had three chicks that night?” Lopez looks at me with awe.

“In one form or another,” Connor answers for me.

A group of women emerges through the back door, and the guys shift their focus off the topic of me and my dick to ogle them.

“How the fuck did Poindexter manage to land her?” Franco, another crew guy, asks, basically echoing what Connor said on Friday night as we all watch the willowy blonde I saw Friday night at Sin stroll out, a flowery lunch bag dangling from her fingers, sharing a secretive laugh with her friends as they take a nearby table.

And so it begins, the gossip, the speculation. Which means Ryan would have heard about her ex by now. I wonder how she’s taking it.

“I’d do that.” Connor tips his head back to finish his can of Coke. He lets out a loud belch, earning a few frowns from their table. Of course, most of those frowns melt away when they see who it’s coming from.

“How do you get away with that?” Franco mutters, shaking his head at Connor.

“Same way I get away with asking a girl if her friend can join.” Connor’s face splits into a wide grin, showing off his dimples. “I’m just so damn irresistible.”

Another round of laughter erupts.

The exterior door swings open and Ryan steps out, her brown paper bag in hand. Heads automatically turn. Her cheeks flush as she quickly seeks us out and begins walking over.

“She actually eats lunch with you?” I ask.

“Never.” Connor grabs the trash from the space between us on the bench, making room for her. “Baby sis! What a pleasure!”

“Shut up. I’m only three months younger than you.”

She wipes the bench with a readied napkin before sitting down, making me shake my head.

“What? I just picked my blouse up from the dry cleaners.” Her gaze skims my dusty pants, telling me without words that she thinks I’m dirty. At least she doesn’t sneer.

The other guys have drifted off into their own conversations—which, thankfully, are too low for us to overhear because I’m sure they’d only prove her theory that the crew is a bunch of STD-riddled cavemen.

She quickly unpacks her lunch onto her lap. Yogurt, apple, grapes, and a cheese sandwich on some sort of thin, dark bread that is probably healthy but looks like cardboard. I’ll bet she’s as predictable as the sun setting each night when it comes to her lunches.

Connor must be thinking the same thing. “Don’t you ever get sick of eating the same lunch every single day?”

“No.”

“But don’t you ever want to just order a big, greasy burger?”

“No. I can’t eat like that. I’d blow up like a balloon.” She glances at the messy remnants of his pizza sub sitting on his lap. “Do you realize how bad it is for you? It’s full of fat and salt and preservatives.”

Connor lifts his shirt up and smooths his hand over his belly, as hard and sculpted as mine. “Does it look like it matters to me?”

She rolls her eyes. “You need to start eating better.”

“You cook and I’ll eat better.”

“As if I’m gonna cook for you. It’s bad enough I have to clean the bathroom after him.”

“Well, you won’t have much to clean today, what with my two-minute cold shower and all,” I remind her dryly.

I think I catch the hint of a smile curling her lips. It’s wiped off quickly as the door creaks open and her ex strolls out.

His eyes skim over the area. They pause on the bench where the three of us sit, widening slightly—I can almost hear the curse in his head—and then he quickly averts his gaze to where his new girl sits.

“Hey, David!” Connor hollers, waving at him. Beside him, Ryan lets out a tiny noise of mortification. “How was the rest of your night on Friday?”

“Fine.” David’s shoulders sink in a little as he heads for the other table.

Connor watches them for a long moment, perfecting a menacing stare I didn’t think he could pull off. “I should nail her just to piss him off. What do you think, Ry?”

“I think I’m going to finish my lunch inside.” Ryan is collecting her food from her lap.

“No. Stay.” I settle my hand on her leg, just above her knee, before she has a chance to stand. “Make him think you don’t care.”

Her body tenses in response. To my touch or my words, I can’t say. Probably both. “You don’t get it.”

“Don’t I?” I study her profile in the noon sunlight. She has such smooth-looking skin, not a scar or a pimple in sight. And for someone who doesn’t wear an ounce of makeup, her face is actually a lot prettier than I first realized, in a more wholesome way.

I know exactly what she feels like. Three weeks after Tasha and I broke up, I was sitting in a bar with my friends when she walked in with a guy. I had three choices: leave, pick up a chick, or start a fight.

My knuckles took a while to heal.

“If you get up and go, you look like a heartbroken little girl who’s running into the bathroom to cry. Is that what you want?”

She shakes off my hand from her knee. “No.”

“I didn’t think so. You want to look like the woman who doesn’t give a shit and has moved on already.” That’s what this bitchiness is, I’m guessing—a shield. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know how to wield it properly. Everyone gets the brunt of it.

“He’s right. Just sit here between the two of us and eat your weird bread, and pretend you don’t care.” Connor stretches his legs out and, leaning back into the bench, closes his eyes.

Ryan shifts her focus to her yogurt, peeling the foil lid off. “You guys saw him on Friday night?” she asks quietly.

“Yeah.”

“So, you knew about her?”

I can see Ryan replaying our conversation that night, when I brought up her honorable accountant. “Yeah.”

Her jaw clenches. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I figured you were angry enough. And you’d hear about it soon.”

“Do you think….” Her voice drifts off.

“That he was with her before you broke up?”

She peers up at me, blinking repeatedly. I don’t need to say it out loud, she’s figured it out.

“This is humiliating. I’m such a fool,” she whispers under her breath, just loud enough for us to hear.

“Forget about that loser. He doesn’t deserve you.”

“I’m trying. It’s not easy.”

“So find a fuck buddy,” Connor drawls lazily. “It’ll make it easier.”

She scowls at him. “Great brotherly advice.”

He shrugs. “What? You know, everyone thinks you’re banging Ronan. You may as well start.”

“No, they don’t.” Her panicked hazel eyes land on me, studying me.

“Am I lying, Ronan?”

I stretch my arm along the back of the bench and start twirling the ends of Ryan’s brunette hair through my fingertips. It’s a lot silkier than I expected it to be. “I wouldn’t say everyone thinks that. Not yet, anyway.”

“Bullshit.” She shifts her head away, making me lose my grip.

I simply find another strand and continue toying. “What did you expect? We live together. You’ve seen me naked—”

“Because you flashed me.”

“Great foreplay, by the way,” Connor murmurs. “Good job, man.”

“And everyone knows what those dirty crew guys are like,” I mock. “And yet here you are, eating lunch with us. You came out to us.”

“To Ronan,” Connor interrupts, egging her on. “A lot of red flags, if you ask me. Everyone’s gonna be talking.”

Ryan’s cheeks begin to flame. “This is payback for the shower this morning, isn’t it?”

I steal her apple right off her lap and take a big bite. “And I’m going to enjoy every damn second of it.”