Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 96600 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 483(@200wpm)___ 386(@250wpm)___ 322(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96600 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 483(@200wpm)___ 386(@250wpm)___ 322(@300wpm)
“It’s not ideal.” She chewed her cheek while thinking it over. “Is it worth breaking up over?”
“We didn’t break up. I just needed time to think.”
“I’m sorry, did we meet yesterday? Do I not know you?” She got up, rubbing her hands on the thighs of her jeans, and headed for my kitchen.
“Don’t eat anything in there. I haven’t been home in weeks.” Of course, my mother had probably been out here throwing away spoiled food and generally snooping around to see what I was up to.
I’d been keeping everyone in the dark about what was happening with Matt. They’d all known, of course, that I’d gone off on a fancy vacation with him and then on to a visit in New York.
But declarations of love? My doubt? I’d dropped all that squarely in my best friend’s lap when she’d come over thinking I was home from a vacation fling.
“I’m looking for alcohol. I need it to deal with you sometimes,” she said, taking down a couple of tumblers from a cupboard. She spoke while she poured cotton-candy-flavored vodka into both, neatly dividing the half-full bottle between them. “You’re running away from another guy, all right? Until you can admit to that, we have no way of moving forward to a resolution.”
I threw my hands up. “Fine. I’m running away from Matt.”
“Great, glad we’re on the same page.” She grabbed a couple of diet sodas from the fridge and poured them into our tumblers. “Why?”
“I told you why. Because he said—”
“Because he said something that you would have totally agreed with before you left here to go to Fuck Island with him.”
She had me there.
I dropped onto the couch and jerked upright at a knob of pressure in my lower back. Pulling the stuffed dragon free, I sat it on the coffee table and tried not to make eye contact with it. Matt had never even been to my house, and there were reminders of him all over it.
Fuck. I had a dildo cast from his actual dick. Why did I think running was going to work?
“How did it even come up?” she asked, bringing the drinks over.
I took mine gratefully and sipped it. Way too strong, but necessarily so, if this was the conversation I had to face. “We were talking about my brother. Ugh, my fucking brother. Okay, so, after Scott threw the most epic tantrums about me and Matt, it turns out he was fucking Matt’s sister all along. Matt’s married sister.”
Sarrah’s eyes widened, and she leaned slightly back.
“I know,” I went on. “Believe me, I know. But when I heard Scott and Catherine—that’s Matt’s sister—talking, one of the things that Scott said was that he would give up billions of dollars to be with her. I mean, not those exact words. More like, she said she couldn’t leave her husband because she had more to lose, and he was like, I would lose it all. Something to that effect.”
“And Matt thought that was unrealistic?” Sarrah swirled her cup.
“That’s what he said.” Those words, I could remember with piercing clarity. “Poetic. Not realistic.”
“Are you sure he wasn’t saying it about your brother and his sister?”
“I—”
“You didn’t clarify if he was asking about you.” She punctuated her statement with a gulp from her tumbler.
“What was I supposed to do? Ask him, ‘would you give up billions for me?’ and hope the answer was different?” What if it hadn’t been different?
She circumvented my “what if” without waiting for me to speak it. “If it was different, would you have believed him?”
“I don’t know. Probably not?”
“Would you have wanted to believe him?” She tilted her head and awaited my answer.
Would I have wanted to? “What kind of question is that?”
“The kind someone asks when they can see their best friend repeating the same bullshit she has repeated in all of her relationships. You’re inventing problems because you want to be the one to leave first.”
“Ouch.”
“Truth hurts.”
I took a long swallow and grimaced at the burn of the alcohol. Truth did hurt, especially when I couldn’t convince myself of a lie. “No one likes to be rejected.”
“You’re right,” she agreed gently. “Nobody does. But you weren’t rejected, were you?”
“Not really,” I admitted.
“Define ‘not really.’ Was he upset that you were leaving?” she asked.
“I think he would have been perfectly happy if I’d stayed in New York for the rest of my life,” I choked out, a hot tear spilling down my cheek.
Sarrah moved automatically to grab a tissue from the box on the coffee table. “And would you have been perfectly happy doing that?”
I took the tissue and blotted under my eyes. “Throwing my life away and jumping straight into a man’s isn’t something that should make me happy.”
“Should or would?”
Sarrah should have gone to law school. She would have had less time to scrutinize my dating life, if she had.