She knows I’m lying.
After last night, the wordorgasmshould be what makes me say fuck it all and dive back into bed with him. Skip the plane ride home. Ignore the ugly reality waiting for me with Emma being mad and the café being sold and my entire future completely uncertain.
Who wouldn’t want to have another several hours of holy orgasms instead?
But it’s not the orgasms that have me desperately wanting to strip off the clothes that I don’t think I put on straight to climb back into bed with him.
It’s the simple kindness in his small gesture of patting the bed. “Let me get the ice.”
I don’t deserve that kindness.
Not when I know my best friend is hurting and it’s my fault.
Ideservethat Chandler sold the family café, which is where I’ve always planned to spend my entire life. Ideserveto worry that everything will change and I’ll never be able to talk the new owner into selling it back to me. Ideserveto know I couldn’t afford it even if Icouldconvince whoever it is to sell it to me.
Ideservefor Emma to hate me forever.
I swallow another nauseous wave of guilt that I staved off overnight but is back in full force and even bigger this morning. “Stay. I’m getting the ice.”
“I have longer legs. I can do it faster.”
“Would youpleaselet me have this?”
“If you give me your phone number.”
“You don’t want my phone number.”
“But I do.”
“You’re hungover and not thinking straight.”
“I’m stone-cold sober,anda morning person, and you fascinate me.”
Why?
Why?
If I were anywhere else, and my entire world hadn’t just imploded because of secrets and gossip, I would be crawling back into bed with this man and playing a game ofI’ll give you my number one digit at a time after you earn it with sexual favors. Then we’d go to breakfast, I’d invite him home to walk my dog with me, and we’d see where this goes.
Which, for the record, isnotnormal for me.
I’m a casual hook-up type of woman. Spend your youth learning how to listen in and get the gossip, you hear things you don’t want to know.
And then you start to see things you don’t want to see.
Sometimes, before you know better, because you’renine years old, you’re right in the thick of making relationships implode. And you don’t know it until you find yourself getting hustled back to the café kitchen where Grandma calls your mom to come get you before someone hurts you for repeating things you were never supposed to hear in the first place.
And you get a little older, still hearing the same things, but keeping them to yourself now. And you hear enough to realize that truly solid relationships with mutual love, respect, and appreciation are rare, and the pursuit of such a relationship ends with heartbreak more times than not.
Add in that I know the full and complete truth about my paternal lineage, and just how badly my mom and grandma were hurt by men, and I’mnope-ing right out.
Yes, Grandma ultimately got to spend her life with the very best of the best of men in my grandfather. And yes, my mom has no regrets about how her life turned out.
But the degree of hurt that they both suffered to get tosatisfiedrather thanecstaticwith their lives?
No way. I’m flat-out uninterested in relationships.
Even Emma, who was my favorite example of someone who could love another person through all of their flaws, ultimately couldn’t have that one-in-a-million love story.
