I laughed. Sure his wording wasn’t exactly telling me that I looked nice, but for his standards, it was as good as I would ever get.

“Why don’t you ever dress up for me?” Mason asked, taking a seat across from us.

“There’s no point; we both know you like your ladies with more facial hair than I have,” I snickered.

The imp shrugged and winked at his self-proclaimed soul mate, the man sitting next to me. “True.”

The gentle movement of the bus as it slowed to a stop made us shift slightly. There was loud talking from the front before the familiar sounds of the door opening and the guys piling out let me know we’d made it to the mall. Slapping my twin’s thigh, I told him I’d see him later before walking out. My idiots and some of the TCC guys had been planning on going to some bar that carried over three hundred different types of beer, and I wasn’t in the mood to sit through that experience. Hanging out with Sacha just seemed like a bonus. A very pleasant bonus. A very pleasant, platonic bonus, like spending time with Carter would be.

Right.

I’d barely jumped off the bus’s steps, slipping the strap of my purse across my shoulder, when I spotted Sacha and Isaiah outside waiting.

“Is it only us going?” I asked, walking up to them.

Sacha’s eyes slanted over in my direction, his mouth already opening in a certain way that let me know a smart-ass comment was going to be coming out of it in a moment, but nothing actually came out. He looked at me—my face, the bare skin of my chest above the purple cotton of the sundress, and then down the length of my body slowly. It made me self-conscious and I fidgeted. It was second nature to want to pull the front of my dress up but it wasn’t like it was low to begin with.

“It’s only us,” Isaiah’s low drawl answered. He looked at me evenly. “I like your hair.”

Unfortunately I was one of those people that never knew how to handle a compliment well from people I wasn’t close to, or even know what to say afterward. My face got a little warm and I smiled at him. “Thank you.”

I smiled at him once more before looking back at Sacha who was busy inspecting my face again. He smiled but it was a distracted, distant sort of look. The entire walk through the parking lot and the mall was surprisingly quiet. Isaiah hadn’t really spoken more than two handfuls of words to me in the nearly three weeks we’d been on tour, and Sacha was strangely silent. After buying our movie tickets, I nudged my gray-eyed friend when Isaiah said he was going to the restroom. We got in line at the concession stand.

“Is he usually really quiet around everyone?” I asked, gesturing with my head in Isaiah’s retreating direction.

“Isaiah?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

Sacha nodded his head, keeping his eyes locked on the menu mounted from the ceiling. “Yeah. He doesn’t talk much.”

I wasn’t much of a talker unless I felt comfortable around someone, and it just so happened that I was surrounded by three of the people that already knew the best and the worst parts of me. If I couldn’t be myself around them, who could I be myself around? For some reason, something about Sacha put me at ease and he happened to be an exception.

He didn’t say anything else as the line ahead of us shortened, and it was really beginning to weird me out. Why was he being so quiet? It wasn’t like I needed to talk all the time, but still. Everything had been fine before I’d showered, so the change in his attitude was pretty confusing.

“Are you okay?” I finally tapped into my imaginary balls to ask, turning just slightly at the shoulders to glance at him.

He frowned, still keeping his gaze on the menu. “Yes, why?”