“How so?”
I shrugged. “I tried to kiss him in public, and I don’t know, I got the feeling that he didn’t want to.”
Sierra furrowed her brows. “Is that all?”
I thought back to the entire Nadia situation, but thought better of myself than to share that Charlie was a porn star and that I was his most recent guest fuckdoll. I really, really, really didn’t want them to go searching it up and seeing me naked!
“Sorta …” I whispered.
Sun drew her finger around her cup lid. “It’s so obvious that he wants to be with you.”
“Sure, maybe physically,” I whispered. “But I don’t know about emotionally.”
Maybe he had been hesitant about being a couple because of how emotional I was, especially after I broke down in tears right after the best sex of my life. He’d probably thought he had done something wrong or overstepped a boundary.
And I just couldn’t get out of my freaking head!
“And you said that I’m being dramatic,” Heather said, playfully rolling her eyes.
“My thinking is perfectly logical,” I hummed, though I knew it was clouded with insecurities from my limp to Nadia—especially Nadia.
“All right, girls,” Carol, the barista, said from behind the counter. “We’re closing up soon.”
I gathered my belongings and shoved them into my backpack, my lips tugged into a frown. Maybe I just needed to get out of my head a bit. Charlie and I had been best friends for few years now.
If he didn’t want to be seen with me, then he wouldn’t go out with me every chance that he got. If he didn’t like me, then he wouldn’t pick up my favorite cheesecake and take me on mini-golf dates and help me make strawberry soaps on Saturday nights.
“I have just the thing to get your mind right,” Heather said with a mischievous grin.
I arched my brow. “And that is …”
“We’re going out.”
“In the middle of the week?” I asked, slipping my bag over my shoulder.
“Hell yes!” Heather exclaimed, jumping out of her seat and grabbing my hand. “And I know just the place. If you don’t think you’re hot, then we’ll make sure you know you are. Tons of guys will be crawling all over you tonight.”
“What?!” I exclaimed. “I don’t want that!”
“Oh, come on.” Sierra gently elbowed me. “If Charlie isn’t going to admit his feelings to you, then you have to make him. Get him jealous so he claims you while everyone is watching.”
The girls began giggling like it was their fantasy.
But they didn’t know that what she had just described … had happened today.
“Where are we going?” I asked, trying desperately to go home. “Isn’t it too?—”
Evelyn snatched my cup of tea from the table as the girls dragged me to the door. “We’re going to Radiant.”
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
CHARLIE
The biting cold seared my cheeks. I pulled my coat together and walked down Pittsburgh’s icy sidewalks toward Radiant, seething. I had been looking all around the city this afternoon and evening for that stupid fucker, called his phone countless times, and even asked the few friends that I knew he had in the city just to find him.
After tugging open the door and walking past security, I shook off the snow from my coat and slipped out of it, and then I handed it to the attendant. She gave a small smile with a curt nod, depositing the coat in the back room.
