“Help yourself,” Lexie told her.
“I need to be your level of drunk if I’m going to watch this show,” Berkley said with a shrug.
“You’re going to need to start shotgunning them if you want to get on my level before midnight,” Lexie told her, and Berkley chuckled.
They sat in companionable silence until one episode switched to the next. Lexie tried to tamp down her need to talk, desperately wanting to ignore that urge in her chest to purge her feelings to Berkley. Unfortunately, her mouth had other plans.
“I miss him,” she said quietly.
Berkley, still seated behind her, leaned forward and began combing her fingers through Lexie’s thick, dark hair in the way she had been doing for Lexie for years. It reminded Lexie of being a little girl and having her mother brush her hair every night before bed.
Before she and her father got too busy to be parents.
Emotional intimacy had been in short supply in the Monroe household while Lexie was growing up. She didn’t have any siblings, and once her parents’ venture capital firm took off when they landed their first six-figure payoff, they just sort of…disappeared. With the constant school changes, Lexie struggled to connect with anyone, and rarely made friends. Her formative years were not meant to be spent friendless at school and parentless at home, but that’s exactly what happened.
Lexie had been a plaything for her parents, a trophy daughter. They trotted her out to parties and meetings, putting on a show for potential business partners. It was their way of saying, “Hey, look. We’re family people. We have a beautiful daughter whom we love dearly, so you should definitely trust us with your money.”
Truth be told, her parents didn’t even particularly like each other outside of the fact that they worked well together and had an image to maintain.
On the surface, Lexie had been what they needed her to be; she didn’t see the point in fighting it when they refused to realize how fucked up the way they treated her was. On the inside, she was a tangled mess, her self-worth tied wholly to what she could do for other people. By the time Lexie had reached her teen years, and puberty came and went overnight, a growth spurt along with it—not only her height but her chest as well—she stopped striving to make lasting, emotional connections with people and instead chose to use sex to fill that void inside of her.
Berkley, Amelia, and Kimber and the friendships she’d formed with them had helped repair a lot of that emotional damage, and Lexie was terrified to think of where she might be now had she not met them all that first week of classes at Michigan State nearly a decade ago.
And, of course, she had never been in a serious relationship before Mitch, had neverwantedto be. She’d had flings, of course, but never something that she saw lasting past a few weeks and certainly never something she wanted to keep for life. But being with him…she had thought that maybe someone finallysawher, saw all the rough edges, the sharp words she wielded as weapons, the hole in her heart she thought she couldn’t ever fill, and loved her anyway. But they say hindsight is twenty-twenty, and Lexie was living with the consequences of her actions. She never gave herself fully to another—mind, body, heart—and this was exactly why: it had been a year since Mitch had left, and she was still nursing the wounds.
But she was the one that had pushed him away. Maybe if she’d bothered to fight for him, to tell him she messed up and beg for him to take her back, to respond to one of his damn text messages before he changed his number and moved clear across the country, things would be different now.
The worst part about it was that Mitchknew. He knew about all the times when Lexie was barely old enough to be trusted not to wet the bed that her parents would travel for business, leaving her to fend for herself in whatever fancy apartment they would rent in the city of the month.
And he still left anyway, without a goodbye, without giving her something to hold onto.
He had promised to spend every day reminding her that she was a gift, and the second she tried to push him away, he gave up.
She couldn’t decide which of them she was angrier with.
“I miss his eyes and his hair and that Greek statue body of his,” Lexie continued when she came back to the present. “But I also miss his laugh, and how kind and gentle he can be with other people.
“And I hate that I miss him, you know? He gave zero fucks about leaving me behind, came back to Michigan and turned me away when I tried to see him, and I can’t seem to get over him.” She stood abruptly, completely ignoring the beer bottle she knocked over as liquid began to pool on the floor. Berkley hopped up to grab a stack of napkins leftover from Lexie’s earlier feast, but Lexie kept talking. Now that she had opened the floodgates, there was no stopping her. “I had to move into a new fucking apartment just to get away from him! Everywhere I looked in that place, there sat his ghost. Eating at the kitchen island. Shaving in the morning, a towel wrapped around his waist, water from the shower still glistening on those ridiculous muscles of his. Asleep next to me in bed.” She gripped her hair at her temples and pulled, the sting returning some of her sanity. “I don’t know how I’m just supposed to forget everything we had. How was it so easy for him?”
Berkley wrapped her arms around Lexie’s waist, resting her head on Lexie’s boobs. Lexie couldn’t help but laugh, their height difference as comical as ever. But before she knew it, she was choking back a sob, and then all at once, she was crying, her tears dampening the top of Berkley’s head.
“I wish I could give you some quick fix potion to make this easier on you, Lex,” Berkley said, her voice muffled against Lexie’s chest. “But I can’t. The only way out is through.”
“This is fucking bullshit,” she said, reaching up to wipe her tears away with the back of her hand.
“A good place to start would be not bottling everything up for an entire year until you’re drunk and sobbing into your best friend’s hair with a stupid ass reality show on as ambient noise,” Berkley said, pulling away to smile up at Lexie.
“This show really is awful, isn’t it?”
Berkley giggled, and soon Lexie joined in, the crying stopping almost as quickly as it had started. “You need to talk to me more,” Berkley said.
“I know.”
“I know it’s not exactly your cup of tea, but it’s going to help. That I can promise. Plus, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time with him at the wedding.”
“God, don’t remind me,” Lexie groaned, throwing herself dramatically onto the couch. Berkley plopped down next to her.
“It’s the biggest day of my life, Lex,” Berkley said. “Surely you can hold it together long enough to let Brent and I have a happy wedding day. I know it’s not going to be easy, and I honestly wish things could be different, but…I can’t tell Brent who he can or can’t have as his best man.”
