Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 128417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
The healthy choice would be to click out of Jen’s email right now. It’s making me doubt Josh and I don’t want to do that. He’s been nothing but incredible toward me. Generous. Attentive. Affectionate. Passionate. I’m acting crazy right now. So what if Jen’s mom is Gabrielle LeMonde? That doesn’t change anything. Why is that sending me into a tailspin? I should shut Josh’s laptop and stop this right now.
But I don’t.
In fact, I do the opposite: I open the second picture attached to Jen’s email.
Holy Oh-No-She-Didn’t, Batman.
If I felt sick after seeing the picture of Jen with her movie-star mom, then I feel terminally ill after seeing this second photo.
It’s a naked selfie of Jen. She’s smiling broadly and pushing her “pretty titties” up toward the camera—obviously inviting Josh to “motorboat” them “again.”
My eyes prick with tears. Is Jen a pathetically desperate girl who’s pursuing a hot guy after he’s clearly told her to get lost? Or, to the contrary, is she a girl who’s merely going after a guy who slept with her and then continued encouraging her? Josh told me he’s not interested in Jen—and yet he called her after Reed’s party. Why’d he do that? And what did he “suggest” to her when they spoke? Suddenly, I don’t know what’s what anymore.
My heart is racing. I wipe my eyes. I never cry and I’m not gonna start now. Hell no. It’s so unlike me to feel this jealous and insecure. God, I hate myself right now. I’m acting like a freak and a puss and a lunatic. I need to detach. I need to stop caring. Josh Faraday isn’t my boyfriend (though I admit I want him to be), and I’m not his girlfriend. I’ve got no right to feel this way. The man can do what he wants.
No, he can’t. He’s mine, goddammit. Mine.
I slam Josh’s laptop shut and set it on the table. I’ve got to get the hell out of here. Josh will be here any minute to “distract” me from his application and I need to pull my shit together before then—because right now I feel like I’m going to fly completely off the handle and say a million things I’m gonna regret.
I stand to leave—just as the door of the suite bursts open.
Josh bounds into the room. “Hey, Party Girl with a Hyphen,” he says, holding up a condom packet playfully. “Can I interest you in a little distraction from your reading?”
I stalk straight past Josh toward the front door, my eyes burning and my mouth clamped shut.
“Kat?”
I march to the door and fling it open like I’m trying to take the damned thing off its hinges.
“Oh shit,” Josh says. “You read my application without me?” His voice is pure anguish. “Goddammit, Kat. Lemme explain. This is exactly why I didn’t want you to read that stupid thing in the first place.”
3
JOSH
“Kat, come on!” I shout at her back, but she keeps marching down the hallway toward the penthouse’s private elevator, her arms swinging wildly. Déjà fucking vu. How many times am I gonna have to chase this goddamned terrorist down a fucking hallway? “Oh, come on, Kat. It wasn’t that bad.”
But she just keeps on marching. She pounds on the call button for the private elevator and crosses her arms, her back to me.
“You can’t possibly be this upset. What the hell?”
She whirls around and I’m shocked to see hot tears streaming down her cheeks.
Panic floods me. My application made her cry? Shit. I’ve obviously grossly miscalculated the situation. I’m floored. “Kat,” I blurt, my chest tightening. “I know everything I wrote in that application came off as douche-y and angry and fucked-up, but the truth is I was just heartbroken when I wrote all that shit.” Oh God, the words are tumbling out of my mouth. “I’d just gotten out of a three-year relationship that didn’t end well,” I ramble, “and I won’t go into detail about everything that happened, but trust me, I had some shit to work out.” I take a deep breath. “I was devastated, to be perfectly honest—I felt like there was something deeply wrong with me, and...” My heart is racing. I swallow hard. “For reasons I don’t wanna go into, there was no way for me to do any of that stuff I wrote about with my girlfriend. And that was okay, of course, because I never would have pushed her to do anything she wasn’t comfortable with—never—but when we broke up—well, actually, when she cheated on me instead of doing me the courtesy of actually breaking up with me—I figured, ‘Well, fuck it. YOLO. Life throws you lemons, make lemonade.’ So I joined The Club and rode a month’s worth of Mickey Mouse roller coasters so I could pull my shit together and move on. And I don’t regret any of it because it actually worked—I totally moved on and now I’m perfectly fine.” Shit. I’m rambling. I’m incoherent. I’m out of breath. Fuck. I force myself to stop talking.