Page 31 of Heartland

“Are yousureit was her?” Maybe Rickie was so baked he got it wrong.

His silence says,Really, dude?

“But didn’t she see you sitting there?” I ask. I mean—it’s one thing to cheat, but it’s another to do that in front of your boyfriend’s roommate.

“Didn’t look like she was in the mood to be subtle.”

My heart drops. “What the hell? I was gone for aweekend.”

“Which shehates,” he points out.

“You think that makes it okay?” My voice gets all high and weird, and anger squeezes my chest.

“Did I say that?” His voice is as calm as ever. Rickie never gets riled up about anything. It’s part of his charm, and it makes us easy roommates. “Sorry to drop this on you. But I didn’t know where you were headed today, and I thought you needed to know.”

“Thanks,” I grunt. “I’ll be home in twenty minutes, anyway.”

“I’ll put the teapot on.” Rickie ends the call.

“Dylan,” Chastity says. “Turn here?”

“Fuck.” I almost missed the turn toward her dorm, because I’m so stuck inside my head. I put on the blinker and change lanes so quickly that the guy behind me lays on the horn.

Chastity flinches. “Are you okay?”

“Sure,” I thunder. “Never better. This is why I don’t date, though. What is the fucking point?”

She clears her throat. “Why are you dating her, anyway?”

I snort. “You probably don’t want to hear the answer to that question.”

“You’re right,” she murmurs. “I probably don’t.”

All the happy, optimistic thoughts I’d been feeling today are justgone. Fucking Kaitlyn. Making me look like an idiot just because she got a little bored when I left town.

I pull up outside the dorm and put the truck in park. Kaitlyn might be in there right now. I could try to find a parking spot and ask her what the heck happened.

Or I could go home and save myself the fifty bucks it would have cost to take her out to dinner.

“Are you okay?” Chastity asks again.

That snaps me out of my own gloomy thoughts. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. Good work this weekend, Chass. See you Wednesday for Algebra? I promise I won’t leave you at the library again.”

“Okay,” she says softly. “It’s a plan. I’m sorry about…” She looks wildly uncomfortable.

“Not your problem,” I grumble. “Be well. Take good notes in algebra.”

“Will do.” I get a flash of a smile as she climbs out of the truck.

And then? I turn the truck around and navigate back to Rickie’s gingerbread house on Spruce Street. For the first time in my life, I’m living in a place where the neighbors’ houses are visible from the window, and I can walk all the places I need to go.

Don’t tell my family, but I kind of love it.

I park my truck in the driveway. Rickie owns the house outright—he doesn’t even have a mortgage. My rent money goes to taxes and utilities. He told me he bought the house with cash from a legal settlement, but he won’t say why he was owed this windfall.

That’s fine with me. Rickie can have his secrets. For modest monthly rent, I get one of the semi-dilapidated house’s second-story bedrooms to myself, plus a place to park my truck. And Rickie is interesting company. That’s probably the best part.

When I walk in through the back door, he’s sitting at the kitchen table in a silk bathrobe. His ever-present teacup is in one hand, and his other holds a volume by Goethe. In German. He lifts his big eyes, peering at me from beneath his mop of hair. Rickie has the good looks of a European model who doesn’t take good care of himself.