But my relief was short-lived as Finn squeezed in just as the doors banged shut.
“Leave.” I pointed back toward the ballroom with the mic.
“No. Why are you so pissed?”
“Are you serious, Finn?” I decided to go on the offensive. “How’s the open relationship?”
“It’s closed again,” Finn said. “I told her what happened in New York—”
“Youwhat?” I pressed the microphone into the crisp white cotton of Finn’s dress shirt. He took a step back, tripping over his feet and clanging into a stainless steel rack filled with dirty dishes. I advanced a step further. “I mean, how do you even have that conversation? ‘Hi, honey, how was your weekend? Mine was fine; fingered an old friend on her rooftop.’”
Finn winced. “Emma, come on. She and I had an open relationship.”
“Yeah, one you didn’t even want to be in in the first place,” I scoffed. Then realization hit me. “Oh my god. You used me to make her jealous.” Shame sliced through me at the thought that I hadn’t just been rejected, I’d been used. That night on the rooftop hadn’t meant anything to him. He’d just beentesting the limits of his “open” relationship, trying to get the girl heactuallywanted to commit.
“What? No, Emma. I—”
But I didn’t need to hear his pathetic excuses. “Does she know you text me every day?”
Guilt flashed across his face. “Emma, you’ve always been one of my best friends—I was glad that we were reconnecting. But I told you I wanted to try to make it work with Pilar. I thought you understood.”
“You are so full of shit,” I hissed. “What happened to ‘I would never hurt you without a good reason’? Or ‘I’m sorry for playing games’?” It felt good to throw Finn’s words from that night on the roof back in his face. But right then an avalanche of reality crashed over me. The texts I’d spent months poring over hadn’t beenI want to work it out withyou. It had beenI want to work it out withPilar. What if Finn hadn’t been stringing me along? What if I had just been reading into things, building a fairy tale in my head that didn’t exist? That stupid flirty text I sent about the rooftop flashed in my brain like a neon sign. Finn had replied,Emma, please don’t do this to me.I took it to mean “don’t make me hard when there’s a whole country between us and I can’t do anything about it.” But maybe all he meant was “don’t make things awkward.”
Here in the hotel kitchen, with caterers pushing past us unbothered, Finn continued, “I know I’ve been unfair to you in the past, that there were times when you weren’t able to count on me. But I’m trying to change. I’m trying to be a better person here, not just someone who bails the second things get hard. That’s why I wanted to give things a real chance with Pilar.”
Around us, the kitchen staff bustled about, preparingthe dessert course. A chef was touching up sugar roses on a silvery-white three-tiered cake. Finn continued to look at me, a crease between his brows. But it was the tinge of pity I saw in his dark eyes that sent me over the edge. Here he was, claiming that he was trying to change, when all he’d done was prove to me yet again that he was the same Finn Hughes who stood me up at prom all those years ago. Someone who dangled happiness in front of me, only to snatch it away again. I grasped for a way to turn this back on him, for any proof that Finn had lied to me. “I told you that I broke up with Preston after that night, and you said it was the right decision.”
“Yeah, because he sucked. I didn’t think you were breaking up with him for me.”
“I didn’t do it foryou.” I hadn’t—at least not totally. Preston and I weren’t a good fit. But it took being with Finn for me to realize that. And Ihadassumed that Finn was going to break up with Pilar too. That we were both on the same page. That we were both making the same decision. Instead, Finn had apparently weighed the pros and cons and decided that Pilar was the better option.
“Good.” Finn’s tone was heavy with a bitterness that he didn’t have any right to. “I mean, how was it going to work between us, Emma? I can’t leave California right now. You just got a new job in New York.”
“You’re right. It would never work out.” The words came out of me, dull and lifeless. I was so stupid for thinking it would. I felt like an idiot for googling design firms in the Bay Area even after I’d gotten my dream job in New York.
Finn paced across the kitchen, then wheeled on me. “You were never explicit about wanting to be together.”
“Idon’twant to be together,” I shot back. “Not now. Not ever.” And I didn’t. I wanted to be as far away from Finn Hughes as I could possibly get.
“Okay, then.”
“Fine!”
We stood there, Finn’s arms folded across his chest, my hands still helplessly gripping a wineglass and a microphone, both of us breathing heavily. Then, there was a screech of feedback that we could hear even in the kitchen, and the door edged open. The wedding planner, eyes wide, pointed toward me and mouthed, “It’s on.”
The microphone.
I looked down at it in my hand, its green light shining up at me. My breath started coming in short bursts. “Did… did anyone…”
At the look of pity in the wedding planner’s eyes, I knew. Everyone in the other room had heard me get rejected by Finn Hughes. Everyone on the other side of that door knew that I’d been pining for him while he was “becoming a better person” for his perfect girlfriend.
Even worse, I had gone into explicit detail about exactly what Finn did to me on that lawn chair.
Oh my god.
Mortification unlike I’d ever known washed over me in waves.
The wedding planner pulled the microphone from my slack fingers—along with the wineglass I clearly did not need to be drinking from—and I turned away from the doors to the ballroom in a trance. I couldn’t bear to see any more pitying looks or barely concealed smirks. I made my way through the kitchen and into the hotel lobby, and kept walking.
