“Nah, that shit’s transferable,” Charlie says. “The way you handle the toughest of customers without breaking a sweat? You’ve got skills not everyone can learn, and the rest, you’re smart enough to pick up. I wouldn’t be worried. Anyone would be lucky to have you.”
Well, damn. Here I was thinking Emma’s compliments were the only kind that could knock me over, but it turns out Charlie’s got a mean right hook when he wants to.
Gratitude warms me from the inside out. The one love I have never shied away from is this — friendship.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Charlie says, his grin stretching out, and I know the tender moment is over. “How was your night of mystery with Mr. Moneybags?”
I flush at the memory of every touch, every whisper in my ear, every filthy promise.
Emma turns to him. “Be nice. That’s her boyfriend you’re talking about.”
I groan into my hands as Emma laughs.
“Already?” Charlie asks. “Damn Ivy, you work fast. Should we RSVP to the wedding now, or…?”
I drop my hands to give him the finger. “You can keep your RSVP because we’ve broken up, and I’m never going to see him again.”
What I don’t say is that I keep hoping to bump into him in the elevator, or that every time a man sits beside me at the bar, my heart jumps until I realize it isn’t him.
In senior year, I won the lead role in our production of some show I can’t even remember the name of now. It wasn’t a sign of my skill, because I truly cannot undersell how average an actor I was, but it didn’t matter, because lead meant playing lover to Jake.
My crush on him had lasted two years, kept alive by my own naivety and his manipulation. Not that I’d learned that until after graduation.
But the day casting had been announced, my heart had soared. Straight to the clouds, where my head has always been, lighter than air.
There was a kiss on page twelve.
I dreamed of that kiss every night. It would be our first. Maybe then he’d finally see me as someone other than his friend.
Our lips would meet— and they had to; it was scripted— and the agony of my unrequited love would finally come to an end. Good or bad, I didn’t care.
I just wanted that kiss.
We skipped over it in rehearsals. I’d been too nervous to attempt it at the time, and Mr. Thomas was too focused on staging to care. As long as we hit our marks on the night, he said.
Still, I played it out in my head every night.
By the night of the performance, we’d kissed a dozen times, if only in my imagination. Jake’s strong hands cupping my face, his lips soft under mine, but not hesitant.
Never hesitant.
The moment came, and…
No kiss.
The cue was his, and he missed it. Said his line and walked off stage just as he was supposed to. But no kiss.
I kept going— the show must go on, always— but it stayed with me. The regret of inaction. Of longing. Of dragging someone else into my fantasies.
And a month later, when he sat next to me in the stairwell, whispering how I treated him better than his girlfriend, keeping his hooks in me even as he said we couldn’t be anything but friends…
I decided I’d never lie to myself again.
CHAPTER14
MOM’S THE WORD (OR IT WOULD BE, IF I COULD KEEP MY MOUTH SHUT)
IVY
