The One I Love to Hate Page 13

  “Scotch?”

  Gemma nodded and turned away to pour it without asking which kind. Guess Romano’s only served one.

  Alex rubbed his palms down his thighs, trying to dispel the adrenaline flare that Jess always seemed to spark in him. He didn’t want to argue with her, not tonight. “So, do you work here?”

  There. That was neutral. She couldn’t possibly take offense at that.

  “I cover shifts now and then. It’s mostly Dad and Gemma. I’m just here to get a start on our end-of-the-year paperwork.”

  “Oh, sorry. Do you need me to go?”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  Gemma returned, sliding a highball glass with a healthy pour of amber liquid in front of him. “Have you eaten?”

  He glanced around Romano’s. Nothing about the place gave any indication it served food.

  “This is a restaurant, too?”

  Gemma shook her head. “No, but I keep stuff cooking in the back, just for family and friends.”

  “He just came from dinner, Gem,” Jess protested.

  “But I’m starving,” he interjected quickly.

  Gemma gave a brisk nod. “I’ll make you a plate.”

  “I don’t want to inconvenience her,” Alex said as Gemma departed.

  “You’re not. She feeds everybody. She can’t help it.”

  Silence descended on them. Okay, so a neutral conversation with Jess. This couldn’t be so hard. Alex had chatted up and charmed titans of industry, powerful politicians, and everyone in between. Surely he could manage a reasonable conversation with Jessica Romano.

  “So this is the family business, huh?”

  “Yep. This is our bar.”

  He took a sip of his scotch—most definitely not top shelf—and looked around. It all dated from much earlier in the century, and from the looks of it, nothing had been updated, with the exception of a large flat-screen TV mounted in the corner, broadcasting an old football game. With its white-and-black tiled floor and aged mahogany bar with a brass rail, the place was unfussy and functional. It was a locals’ place, with no pretensions to more.

  Fancy decor would have been wasted on these patrons, anyway. The place was nearly empty, just a few guys at tables and two more down the bar, looking like they’d grown roots there. Guys like this came to drink, watch the game, and shoot the shit with their friends. They weren’t into mood lighting and fancy cocktails.

  “I like it.”

  She snorted dismissively.

  Okay, so much for neutral conversation. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Jessica shot him an appraising sideways glance. “It’s not exactly your kind of place.”

  “Maybe you don’t know what my kind of place is.”

  And here it came. They were already butting heads. Wasn’t this at the root of all their earliest conflicts? Jessica had made assumptions about him from the start. And he could acknowledge now that maybe she’d been right. He could look back on his younger self and see the privilege-tinged arrogance she’d despised.

  But in the intervening years, he’d changed. Jessica hadn’t been interested enough in him to find that out, which had pissed him off. And now here they were, barely able to speak without fighting, which was a shame, because, well, things could have been very different, otherwise.

  Jessica sighed and took another sip of her beer, pulling his focus back to the present. “Maybe I don’t really understand anybody the way I thought I did.”

  “Sounds cryptic.”

  She carried on as if he wasn’t there. “I mean, you think you know people, but clearly not. And meanwhile there’s you.”

  “Me?”

  “Lina’s going on and on about how you’re not the same as you were once and I should just give you a chance and—”

  “You were talking about me to Lina?” An unexpected flare of heat bloomed in his chest.

  She chuckled, tipping her glass back and draining her beer. “Don’t get too excited, tiger.”

  Right. Probably the only thing Jess had to say about him to Lina was an insult. But, still, knowing she’d discussed him, thought about him...that was...

  Jess wasn’t looking at him, so he stole a glance at her, looking at her—really looking—in a way he hadn’t let himself look in a long time. Her lashes, thick and dark, cast long shadows on her cheekbones as she fiddled with her empty beer glass. Color tinted the slight hollows of her cheeks. If she’d had lipstick on earlier, it was all gone now, but she didn’t need it, not with those lips. Jess would probably expire on the spot if she knew how many of his college classes had been spent surreptitiously studying her mouth. He knew the lush and delicate shape of it better than his own.

  Gemma reappeared and set a large shallow bowl full of steaming pasta and sauce on the bar, startling him. “Eat up.” She retrieved a fork from under the bar, then left to refill someone’s beer.

  Stop staring at Jess and change the subject. Alex cleared his throat, trying to get a handle on the last few moments. “Does she cook like this all the time?”

  “All the time.”

  It looked amazing, and smelled even better. When he took a bite, he closed his eyes and let out an involuntary moan of pleasure as the taste exploded across his tongue.

  “I know, right?”

  When he opened his eyes again, she was watching him. “Is it always this good?”

  She cleared her throat and looked away, toward the flat-screen, where some Giants game from the ’80s played out on ESPN Classic. “No, it’s usually better. It’s a Monday night. She’s taking it easy.”

  “This is the best thing I’ve eaten in years.”

  “Says the guy who probably orders Nobu for lunch.”

  “I hate sushi.”

  She glanced back to him in surprise. “Really? You’re the second person who’s told me that recently. Didn’t you just come from dinner? How can you eat like that?”

  “Wilted lawn clippings and gravel. But artisanal and locally sourced, of course.”

  Jess let out a bark of laughter. He’d just made Jess Romano laugh. That had to be a first. “So why’d you go there, anyway?”

  Alex didn’t look up from the freaking amazing food he was devouring. “It was near her place,” he muttered dismissively. The less said about that disaster with Georgia, the better.

  “Right,” Jess murmured.

  He took another mouthful, unabashedly stuffing his face. “I’m serious. Your sister’s an amazing cook.”

  Now he did look over at her. She shrugged, a small smile playing around her lips. Some of that eternally defensive tension seemed to have dissipated in her. Nothing he said to her could get her to lower her guard, but a compliment to her sister seemed to do the trick. He wasn’t sure when he’d actively begun to try getting her to lower her defenses, but he had to admit this was nice, talking without fighting. A vast improvement over the state of war they’d inhabited for far too long.

  * * *

  She wasn’t drunk. Two beers wasn’t enough to accomplish that. So intoxication didn’t explain it.

  As she watched him carefully wiping up a drop of sauce off the bar, she pondered the possibility of a rip in the space-time continuum. Because that would be the only thing that could explain what was happening right now. Alex Drake, here in Carroll Gardens, here in her bar, meeting her sister, eating Gemma’s food, and actually being a decent human being.

  You always wanted to see him here, her subconscious whispered seductively to her. Yes, but that was years ago, she snapped back, before I knew better, before I knew that someone like him didn’t belong in a place like this. Didn’t belong next to a person like me.

  Except here he was, in this place, next to her, making himself at home. And he seemed to fit in just fine.

  “Do you like having a bar?” he asked, chasing the last o
f his food around the bottom of the bowl with his fork.

  “I guess. It’s all I’ve ever known.”

  “Your dad started it, right?”

  “No, my great-grandfather, in 1935.”

  “Seriously?” He looked up long enough to cast his eyes around the bar. She braced for the sarcastic comment she felt sure was coming—some dig about it being long overdue for a renovation, or it being more of a quaint artifact than a business. “That’s amazing. What a legacy,” he said, before returning to his food.

  Oh.

  “She’ll bring you more if you want.” She indicated his bowl when he glanced up in confusion. “She always makes enough to feed an army.”

  “Oh.” Pushing his empty bowl away, he shook his head. “I’m good. Any chance of getting another drink, though?”

  One glance down the bar told her Gemma wasn’t coming back soon. Frank was talking about his ex-wife again, and once he started down that well-traveled road, it was almost impossible to get him to shut up. “I’ll get it.”

  Jess slid off her stool and ducked under the pass-through at the end of the bar. After she’d poured herself another beer at the tap and fetched Alex’s Dewar’s from the shelf, she came back around and hopped back onto her stool.

  “That food was...wow.” Alex splashed more scotch into his glass. “Sorry, I should—”

  She stopped him as he fumbled for his wallet. “Forget it. On the house. It’s a perk.”

  “Thanks. Have you guys ever considered expanding? Serving food?”

  “Um... Gemma looked into it. It would cost a fortune to renovate. Building the kitchen, installing everything for health and safety, bringing the building up to code, applying for all the permits... We couldn’t swing it.”

  Jess had never been ashamed of her family’s financial standing. So what if they were always a hair’s breadth away from being broke? They worked hard and they’d managed a lot with very little. Working-class Italians helped build this city, and she was proud of that. But somehow she’d always hated admitting the truth to Alex. It felt like confessing a weakness, letting him see that she was vulnerable in a place where he was so impervious.

  “That’s too bad. She’s really talented.”

  Ah, hell. It was hard to keep hating him when he was being so nice about Gemma. It was hard to keep hating him for much of anything these days. All those reasons which had seemed so black-and-white for years had started turning a hazy gray lately.

  “So, back to you and Lina.”

  She startled out of her mental floundering. “What? What about Lina?”

  Leaning forward, forearms crossed on the bar, he angled his upper body toward hers. The bar was nearly empty tonight, but his nearness made the air feel close, almost too warm. “Before you were interrupted, you said Lina had told you I’d changed.”

  Panicked, she averted her face as mortification ripped through her. Oh, why did she have this tendency to say whatever she was thinking when she’d had a couple of beers? “I’m not—”

  “So when was this?”

  “When was what?”

  “You and Lina talking about me? Was it at the banquet?”

  “God, can you just drop it?”

  He chuckled, a low, warm sound that made something in her stomach tighten. She ran a hand under her hair, across the back of her neck, prickling with humiliation, and then took another long sip of her beer, just to have something to do. Not like she needed more at this point. There was no telling what she might confess to before the night was out.

  “She’s right, you know,” Alex said quietly, the humor erased from his voice.

  “About what?”

  “I’m not the same person I was when we first met.”

  “No?”

  She chanced a glance at him, catching his offhanded shrug. His hair was elegantly mussed, like he’d had his hands in it for half the day. A very faint late-day stubble shadowed his jaw. Usually Alex was ruthlessly clean-shaven, which highlighted his sculptural features. There was something a little thrilling about seeing his perfection so subtly marred. He looked approachable like this. Still heart-stoppingly beautiful, but the kind of imperfect, rumpled beauty you could imagine waking up next to in bed. She took a hefty swig of beer to deal with her sudden dry tongue and nearly choked on it.

  “College changes everybody, right?”

  What? What had they been talking about? Once again, she’d lost the thread of the conversation, caught up in imagining the feel of that stubbled jaw under her fingers. “Um, sure. Right. College.”

  “Before I started at DeWitt, I’d spent my whole life at Reynolds Academy. Do you know Reynolds?”

  “I went to Sacred Heart, the Catholic school down the street.”

  “Reynolds is in Westchester. It’s K through twelve and it costs six figures a year.”

  Ugh, just when he was becoming almost bearable. “How nice for you.”

  “I’m not telling you that to brag. I’m explaining. The only other people at Reynolds were kids just like me.”

  “Rich ones.”

  “Very rich ones. It can...” He trailed off, running a hand through that wrecked hair again. “I went to school with some good people, but there wasn’t much opportunity to experience the world outside of our very rarefied circle.”

  “I can see how that would happen,” she conceded.

  “I didn’t really break out of that until I went to college.”

  “Where you hung out with Chase, who’s nothing like you.” She hadn’t meant to be sarcastic, but it had turned into something like a default when she was talking to Alex. It was safer, somehow, to keep him at the end of her barbed judgment.

  “I wasn’t talking about Chase. I was talking about you.”

  “Me?” Mystified by the turn in the conversation, she blinked at him in confusion. Where was he going with all this?

  Alex chuckled and drained his scotch. “You were so...” Shaking his head, he stared into space, apparently remembering her at eighteen, which was uncomfortable.

  She finished that unpleasant thought for him. “I’m sure I was completely insufferable. I only saw absolutes. Compromise of any kind meant moral bankruptcy.”

  “You were idealistic. The world was full of injustice and you wanted to take it all on with your writing. And you really believed you could. You were terrifying with all that passion, all that confidence. I had no idea how to deal with someone like you.”

  Okay, yes, she might have been a little intense back then. “No wonder you hated me.”

  “I didn’t hate you. I had a massive crush on you back then.”

  Her heart lurched to a stop. “What?”

  “Come on,” he said, elbowing her gently. “You knew that.”

  Was he serious right now? After everything that had happened, how the hell was she supposed to know that? “Um, no, I didn’t know that.”

  “Jess,” he said patiently. “I entered the Newhouse just to get your attention.”

  She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You entered the Newhouse just to impress a girl?”

  “I entered the Newhouse to impress you. Didn’t work, though. You just hated me more after that.”

  “I needed that prize money to pay for an internship at the Chicago Trib.”

  Alex swiveled to stare at her. “You wanted to intern at the Trib, too?”

  She nodded, fingers curling around her glass hard enough to crack it.

  “Well.” Alex turned his attention to his scotch. “That would have changed a lot, huh?”

  Her mind spun. Would it have? Would everything have happened differently if it had been her in Chicago with him instead of Peyton? It was too much to contemplate.

  “I guess it doesn’t matter in the end. You were into Josh.” He was curled over the bar, staring into his highball gla
ss as one long-fingered hand deftly turned it in circles.

  “I wasn’t, though.”

  His head turned just enough to shoot her a wry smile. “Come on, Jess. That party?”

  A full-body flush flooded her system, mortification swirling in her brain, making her tongue too thick to form words. All these years, that night had lain buried back there in their past. She’d been half-convinced he’d forgotten all about it, just a drunken fumble with a girl he enjoyed teasing. Everything was starting to shift in her memories, each thing she thought she knew like a colored chip in a kaleidoscope, constantly moving and forming new pictures, until she didn’t know which picture to trust. What was real?

  “You were all over Josh that night. Believe me,” he said, letting out a self-deprecating chuckle. “I remember.”

  “That was your fault!” she blurted out, before she could fully think things through. “You and Peyton!”

  His features screwed up so tightly that she would have laughed at his comical confusion if they were discussing anything else. “Peyton Tenaway? What does she have to do with anything?”

  “I heard you with her!”

  Alex waved a hand, encouraging her to keep going. “What did you hear?”

  “You told her it was just a joke. You and me.” Oh, God, here she was, bringing up that moment herself. How had she gotten here? “You said you were just playing around, winding me up, to get a rise out of me.”

  Alex blinked slowly at her, his jade green eyes narrowed in concentration. When the memory hit him, his eyes fell closed. “Ah.” Wearily, he passed a hand over his face, and then left it there, as if he couldn’t bear to open his eyes again. “You heard that.”

  “Yes, I heard that.”

  His hand dropped into his lap and he turned to face her fully. “It was a lie.”

  “What was?”

  “I was lying to her. Peyton... I know she seemed nice, but believe me, there was a nasty side to her. She was fine when we were hanging out in Chicago that summer, but then she wanted more and when I didn’t, this whole other side of her came out. Peyton’s not used to hearing no, and when she does, she can get ugly. If she’d gotten wind of how I felt about you, she’d have been really vicious to you.”