Someone pounded on my door.
That was the first thing that registered as I came fully awake for the first time since I started taking the pain meds Friday night.
“Babe, can you get that?” I managed to get out, though it sounded a bit garbled even to my own ears. “Babe?” I asked again when the pounding continued. I rolled away from the wall and realized Grace wasn’t there. She wasn’t just absent from my bed, she was nowhere in my room. At first, I thought maybe she’d stepped out to go get us some food and the pounding was her, but then I heard my friend Miles shout through the door.
“Dammit, Logan, open the fuck up, you asshole.”
I climbed off the bed and yanked the door open. “Asshole?” I questioned.
“What the fuck happened to your face?” Miles made his way inside, looked around, and then shut and locked my door. “We need to talk and then you can fill me in on the rest of your weekend.” His nose wrinkled in disgust. “It smells like stale ass and nasty pussy in here. Crack a fucking window before you get a staph infection.”
“Fuck you,” I called out. Still, I turned my back on him and went to open my windows. He wasn’t wrong about the air being stale and wreaking of sex. That didn’t mean I would let him insult Grace. I’d made that mistake once with Aoife and I wasn’t about to let shit slide from anyone else, least of all my other best friend.
“Please, tell me it wasn’t Grace who you fucked all weekend.”
“What the fuck do you have against Grace, now?” I sneered at him and bit my tongue to keep from wincing as the action tugged hard on my stitches.
“Besides the fact that she’s a manipulative bitch who cost you the woman you were supposed to marry?” he asked.
“What the fuck are you talking about? Aoife threatened her, and physically attacked her at the party.”
“Wrong, motherfucker!” Miles yelled at me. “Take a fucking seat. I recorded everything that happened from the moment I escorted Aoife to that party to when she asked me to take her home.”
“I was there. I saw what happened,” I argued and regretted it immediately as a warm wetness oozed down my chin from the corner of my mouth. “Fuck,” I hissed and got up to head to my private bathroom. As I cleaned myself and re-bandaged my wound, Miles sat quietly and waited for me to return. I glanced into the mirror and two haunted eyes stared back at me.
My gut twisted in the same way it had been doing for months, since Grace came into my life and I started to feel conflicted between wanting her and keeping myself pure for Aoife. It wasn’t something I’d bothered with in high school because we hadn’t had the second talk back then, the one where we reiterated the fact that we would one day belong to one another.
When I’d come home from boarding school and we had that talk before heading off to college, I’d sworn to myself that I would remain faithful to her - even if we weren’t technicallytogether yet. I didn’t expect the same thing from her, but she’d alluded to the fact that she wasn’t seeing anyone else numerous times since then.
I figured that was why she gave Grace such a hard time lately. Aoife was jealous that there was another woman vying for my attention - and winning. Still, that didn’t give her the right to do what she’d done at the party. It never gave her the right to threaten someone’s life with the likes of her father and his men.
“All better now?” Miles asked me as I came back into my room. I rolled my eyes at him but gave a nod of my head. He patted the bed beside where he sat. “Good, then come sit down because you’re not going to want to be on your feet for this.”
“What is this?”
Miles offered me his phone and hit play on a video that was already queued up on screen. I watched in fascinated horror as the incident between Aoife and Grace played out in a very different way than I’d assumed. Miles was close enough to have gotten most of what was said between them on the recording. There were bits and pieces that were too overshadowed by music and other conversations to hear, but I could get the gist of it. When Grace threw herself to the floor as Aoife’s hands remained at her sides, there was no doubt that I’d heard enough of the conversation to understand what was happening.
As Grace threw herself to the floor, she bumped into a woman behind her who accidentally dropped her drink all over Grace. I paused the video and looked into the eyes of the woman who I had pushed out of the way at the party. The reason I had the scar on my face. I remembered she was trying to tell me what really happened. I closed my eyes and my hands shook as they held tight to Miles’s phone.
“She made it all up,” I whispered.
“Yep,” Miles agreed with an emphasized pop of the last letter. “She made up the other bullshit, too.”
“How do you know?”
Miles gave me a look that said I was a dumbass for even asking after witnessing Grace’s lies in full color. “I was the one who took Aoife home. She didn’t even speak the whole five-hour drive to her school. It wasn’t until we were parked outside of her dorm that she told me about the phone call from a couple weeks ago. Her roommate tried to talk her out of coming to see you Friday because of that phone call. You didn’t even ask for her side of things. You didn’t even know that Grace told her you were in the shower when she answered your phone.”
“Iwasin the shower when she came into my room,” I spoke softly, and attempted to keep from damaging my face further while trying to wrap my head around what really happened. “When I got out of the shower, Grace was in my room and on my phone. She muted it and told me that Aoife had just cussed her out and said some really awful things to her.”
Miles rolled his eyes. “And you never questioned the fact that Grace just let herself into your room that was probably locked? It didn’t seem strange that she was there when you were showering or that she answered your fucking cell phone? It’s not like she couldn’t see exactly who was calling.” My friend shook his head and scoffed at me so hard that I could taste his bitter disappointment in the air. “It never occurred to you to wonder why she thought it would be okay to invade your space without your permission or answer your phone?”
“I didn’t even think. I was so angry about what Aoife said to her-”
“You were angry about Grace’s lies, you mean.” I got ready to tell him that I didn’t know if she lied, but he stopped me. “Nope. Don’t want to hear it. If you’re still willing to believe that bitch after what I showed you, then I’ll leave right now. I’ve seen enough to know that you treated your oldest, best friend like absolute shit and didn’t believe her. I guess I’m next in line.”
“No!” I growled the word at him. “What happened with Aoife?”
“I took her home. We had a long talk about how Grace had been setting her up and you’d been falling for it hook, line, and sinker. She brought up the fact that you hadn’t even bothered to visit her since Grace came into your life. You didn’t call or text unless she initiated it. She said you never even questioned why she hadn’t shown up for the past two months to see you. Aoife knew it was a long shot when she came to tell you she graduated early and could move to Cambridge to be closer to you until you graduated. She took the leap of faith, though, and got her heart broken in the process.”
