Two weeks after eating her pussy, he’d sold his parents’ house and quit his job as Scott’s assistant without so much as a‘Hey, I’m thinking about a career change.’
Sam swore a lot about it, and Scott had been hurt, but that was that. A few months after Toby vanished, Noah found his money podcast, and for a while they’d all enjoyed listening to it and pissing themselves laughing whenever work was slow. But then Nix ruined it by saying he actually gave sound financial advice, and the fun was over.
From then on, Toby was rarely mentioned, and Tabby started to feel like a tit for being so stuck on him. She constantly fought the urge to bring him up in conversation, mention his podcast or drunkenly tell her sisters she’d banged him. She waited for her obsession to fade but couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t over. Whenever she left the house, she found herself scanning the streets for the man who wasn’t there.
“I saw him last week,” she told Jo. “My evil ex-friend.”
She’d finally started to think it would never happen, and then it fucking happened. She’d run into Toby Tennant for the first time in two years under the worst possible circumstances.
“You need to get back out there,” her friend Patience had insisted last Saturday. “It sucks about Sparkling Whine, but you can’t just sit around rotting into the floor like a cordyceps fungus.”
“I can,” Tabby responded, but she’d agreed to go out for a big one that night anyway. She didn’t feel like getting dressed up, so she hadn’t. Patience had taken one look at her baggy, second-hand cargo pants and started crying. “Who are you, and what have you done with Tabitha DaSilva?”
A valid question.
Despite her dogshit outfit, Tabby had been allowed to join Patience’s crew of mega-hot hairdressers and drink buckets of wine alongside them. They’d worked their way from the city to Chapel Street and, around two in the morning, stumbled into the Village Belle Hotel.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” Patience screamed. “You get the margs!”
Tabby had had a bad feeling about the Belle, but she’d dismissed it like she always dismissed bad feelings when she was seven drinks in. She’d wandered up to the bar, and instead of finding a decent range of tequilas and limited chemical relief, she found Toby Tennant having a public threesome. Well, almost… He was sitting in a leather booth across from the bar, his arms around two stunning blondes, both of whom were sticking their tongues in his mouth.
For a second, slower than all the unboiled kettles in the world, Tabby watched them, her heart pumping bile. Running into him after all that time always would have sucked, but he looked so… good.
Everything about it did.
It looked like a fashion shoot: Toby in his hot pink and blue shirt, the girls in matching green dresses, and the bottle of vodka in front of them. Tabby’s mind had unwittingly formed an advertising slogan.
‘Chopin Family Reserve; it’ll get you sucked off two at a time!’
She’d watched the three of them writhe around, none of them concerned that banging in public was still very much illegal. She’d wanted to be mistaken. Wanted to be dead. Wanted to believe Toby had set up this sleazy scene just to hurt her because the alternative—that this was just how he lived now—was too painful to comprehend.
But she didn’t know anything about pain, not yet, because before she could pull her jaw off the floor, Toby disentangled himself from his paramours and looked straight at her.
The memory still had more knives than a butcher shop. Unlike her, Toby’s surprise rapidly morphed into amusement. He’d scanned her body like she was a topless waitress, and Tabby had just stood there, dumbfounded. He’d always been cute, but in the Village Belle Hotel, he’d lookedamazing. He’d put on at least ten kilos of muscle, and his fuckboy haircut perfectly showcased his pale blue eyes and killer cheekbones.
Their gaze met—had his lashes always been a foot long?—and he’d smirked.Smirked.Smirked at her likehe’dpunchedherv-ticket.
She wanted to be disgusted, but a fluttering heat had licked through her like flame, and all she could think about was his weight on her body as he thrust hard and fast.“That feel good, Tabby? You gonna come on it again?”
Toby jerked his head‘C’mere,’and instead of running away, she’d moved toward him like her feet were stuck to those little office chair wheels. The blondes stopped trying to fornicate Toby in the middle of the bar and turned to look at her, too. They were AI-level gorgeous, and Tabby wanted to cover the zit on her chin with her hand. She’d never felt so underdressed or unattractive.
“Tabitha DaSilva,” Toby said in his stupidly deep voice. “Fancy seeing you here...”
Tabby wasn’t super tall, but in that moment, she’d have fit under a three-leaf clover.
“Hi,” she’d managed to say. “Been a while.”
She’d wanted to sound cunty, but it came out as pure uncertainty.
“How’s the family?” Toby asked.
From the slur in his voice, he was drunk and, judging from his pupils, high. But that didn’t cheapen him or the scene she’d stumbled onto. It was just so fucking… sexy. Toby, all pretty and muscular with his pet bimbos at his side.
“My family think you’re a bellend,” she’d said, because why not escalate to petty name calling?
“Fair,” Toby said as though she’d responded normally. “You know, I wanted to come in and see you at Silver Daughters. Thinking about getting a tattoo.”
“Oh, coooool,” Blonde One cooed. She had bright green eyes and seemed as fucked up as Toby. “You’d look so good with a tattoo.”
