Chapter 3
"Sophie." Terry's voice pulled me back to reality.
Only then did I realize my back was pressed against the shelf. I was cornered with nowhere to run.
He eyed my movements, lips curling into a teasing smirk. "What are you hiding from? Scared I'll gobble you up?"
I looked up, met his eyes, and shoved all those tangled feelings down. "Got something to say? If not, I'm leaving. Standing here in the middle of the night talking about this stuff? Seriously, it's weird."
He didn't say a word, kept staring at me.
Then my phone started ringing.
I pulled it out, and Jason Langley's name lit up on the screen.
I saw Terry's eyes flick to the name on my phone, his brow quirking a bit.
I picked up. "Hello?"
"Hey, are you home yet?" Jason's voice came through, a bit muffled by the noise in the background. It sounded like he was in his car. "I finished a meeting. Want me to swing by the restaurant and pick you up?"
I glanced at Terry, a small smile tugging at my lips as my tone softened. "No need to pick me up. Come over to my place, okay?"
There was a brief silence on the other end.
I thought maybe the signal was bad, so I checked the screen to make sure we were still connected. Then I heard Jason laugh softly. "Alright, I'm on my way."
That laugh had a little something extra in it. He knew I was pretending, and I knew he knew the truth.
But that didn't matter. What mattered was that Jason played along.
I ended the call with a smile and lifted my gaze.
The glass door of the convenience store was slowly closing, and outside, the black Maybach was already idling, its taillights casting two dark red lines across the night.
The night breeze drifted in through the gap, carrying the cool bite of early autumn.
Jason shared the same last name as Terry, but they were not brothers. They were cousins.
Jason's mother was Terry's dad's younger sister, the favorite daughter of Terry's grandparents.
She got totally swept up in romance and insisted on marrying a broke guy, who was Jason's dad. That whole wedding didn't offend the family they'd arranged a match with; it really hurt Terry's grandparents.
When Jason was fifteen, his parents died in an accident.
He was brought back to the Langley family, but that "home" always felt like it was behind a sheet of glass. It was close enough to see, but never somewhere he could truly belong.
He'd only come back to the house for a few days during winter and summer breaks, always like a guest passing through.
The year Terry brought me home to the Langleys, I was fifteen, and that was when I first met Jason.
He was seventeen, wrapped around his girlfriend in the swimming pool, kissing her like nobody was watching. When I walked in, he shot me a whistle.
At the time, I never imagined that years later, I'd end up crossing paths with him so much.
About six months after I got shipped off overseas at 21, Jason showed up out of nowhere at the door of my apartment in Catlous.
It was pouring that day. He stood there, half his trench coat drenched, holding a six-pack of beer, wearing that reckless, carefree grin. "Feeling bored at home, so I figured I'd come here for a change of scenery."
He stuck around for two whole years.
For those two years, neither of us ever mentioned the Langleys or Terry.
He gamed with me, and I drank with him. Two people hurt by the same place licked each other's wounds in a city far from home.
But that was where it stopped.
There was no love between us, not even something we needed to spell out. We both got it.
He had his own hang-ups, and I had mine. We stuck together, making life a bit easier for each other.
He bought me a top-of-the-line gaming rig, and I played League of Legends and PUBG with him. He took care of the material stuff, while I brought the emotional value.
It was a fair trade, honest and square.
Since I came back, he transferred this apartment over to me.
"This is your home," he said. "Crash here as long as you like."
Home.
The same word again.
I didn't say no.
It wasn't that I didn't know how much this apartment was worth. It was because he said that word: home.