Roomies - Christina Lauren Page 0,1

to think about it. In some ways, it seems like he gives the guitar an actual human voice.

He looks up as I drop a bill into his case, squinting at me, and gives me a quiet “Thanks very much.”

He’s never done that before—looked up when someone dropped money in his case—and I’m caught completely off guard when our eyes meet.

Green, his are green. And he doesn’t immediately look away. The hold of his gaze is mesmerizing.

So instead of saying, “Yeah,” or “Sure”—or nothing at all, like any other New Yorker would—I blurt, “Iloveyourmusicsomuch.” A string of words breathlessly said as one.

I’m gifted with the humblest flicker of a smile, and my tipsy brain nearly shorts out. He does this thing where he chews on his bottom lip for a second before saying, “Do you reckon so? Well, you’re very kind. I love to play it.”

His accent is heavily Irish, and the sound of it makes my fingers tingle.

“What’s your name?”

Three mortifying seconds pass before he answers with a surprised grin. “Calvin. And yours?”

This is a conversation. Holy shit, I’m having a conversation with the stranger I’ve had a crush on for months.

“Holland,” I say. “Like the province in the Netherlands. Everyone thinks it’s synonymous with the Netherlands, but it’s not.”

Oof.

Tonight, I’ve concluded two things about gin: it tastes like pinecones and is clearly the devil’s sauce.

Calvin smiles up at me, saying cheekily, “Holland. A province and a scholar,” before he adds something quietly under his breath that I don’t quite make out. I can’t tell if the amused light in his eyes is because I’m an entertaining idiot, or because there’s a person directly behind me doing something awesome.

Having not been on a date in what feels like a millennium, I also don’t know where a conversation should go after this, so I bolt, practically sprinting the twenty feet to the platform. When I come to a halt, I dig in my purse with the practiced urgency of a woman who is used to pretending she has something critical she must obtain immediately.

The word he whispered—lovely—registers about thirty seconds too late.

He meant my name, I’m sure. I’m not saying that in a false-modesty kind of way. My best friend, Lulu, and I agree that, objectively, we’re middle-of-the-pack women in Manhattan—which is pretty great as soon as we leave New York. But Jack—Calvin—gets ogled by every manner of man and woman passing through the station—from the Madison Avenue trustafarians slumming it on the subway to the scrappy students from Bay Ridge; honestly, he could have his pick of bed partners if he ever took the time to look up at our faces.

To confirm my theory, a quick glance in my compact mirror reveals the clownish bleed of my mascara below my eyes and a particularly ghoulish lack of color in the bottom half of my face. I reach up and attempt to smooth the tangle of brown strands that every other moment of my life are straight and lifeless, but have presently escaped the confines of my ponytail and defy gravity around my head.

Lovely, at present, I am not.

Calvin’s music returns, and it fills the quiet station in this echoing, haunting way that actually makes me feel even drunker than I thought I was. Why did I come here tonight? Why did I speak to him? Now I have to realign all these things in my brain, like his name not being Jack and his eyes having a defined color. The knowledge that he is Irish just about makes me feel crazy enough to go climb on his lap.

Ugh. Crushes are the worst, but in hindsight a crush from afar seems so much easier than this. I should stick to making up stories in my head and watching from a distance like a reasonable creeper. Now I’ve broken the fourth wall and if he’s as friendly as his eyes tell me he is, he may notice me when I drop money in his case the next time, and I will be forced to interact smoothly or run in the opposite direction. I may be middle-of-the-pack when my mouth is closed, but as soon as I start talking to men, Lulu calls me Appalland, for how appallingly unappealing I become. Obviously, she’s not wrong. And now I’m sweating under my pink wool coat, my face is melting, and I’m hit with an almost uncontrollable urge to hike my tights up to my armpits because they have slowly crept down beneath my skirt