She accepted the drink and settled into the barstool in front of the island with the wariness of someone expecting bad news. She took a long, slow sip of her drink, her eyes never leaving my face. “Okay… shoot.”
After a huge gulp of red wine, I blurted, “I kissed Femi last night.”
Her red braids flew across her face as she lifted her head to look at me. “What?”
“Don’t act so surprised,” I said in an attempt to reduce the impact and make it sound casual. It didn’t work. My voice came out defensive and slightly strangled.
“Isabelle Marie Dubois. What do you mean you kissed Femi last night? How did you even see him? What exactly happened? We’re skipping very crucial steps here.”
“Well…” I paused to take another sip of my wine, buying time, and trying to figure out how to explain the unexplainable. “He turned up at Sebastian’s party. Xavier invited him, apparently. And… I don’t know, Naomi. I’m weak. I'm pathetically, embarrassingly weak when it comes to him."
She placed a hand over her forehead. “You know better than that, don’t you? We've talked about this. Multiple times. With diagrams."
Ididknow better. We had talked about it numerous times and at length, over multiple bottles of wine. But I hadn’t seen Femi in eight years. I thought I’d be immune to his charms at this point.
Well, it turned out it was still as effective on me. Still potent and devastating. Still capable of short-circuiting every functioning brain cell I possessed.
“So, what’s going to happen now?” Naomi asked, setting down her glass with a decisive clink.
I shrugged, suddenly exhausted. “I’m going to stay far away from him.” She gave me a look. I raised my hands in defense. “What? It’s not like I’m going to see him again.”
She gave me another look, this one even more pointed. “Oh, my God, Naomi. Would you stop looking at me like that?”
She grinned, emptied her glass and jumped to her feet. “I’m going to leave you here to think about what you’ve done. I have a shoot tonight.”
“Fine. But remember your curfew.”
“Yes, mom.” She shook her head before disappearing up the stairs.
The fact that she hadn’t said much hadn’t gone unnoticed. I knew her so well that I knew the things she didn’t say, the lectures she was holding back. And they were things I’d already told myself, truths I’d been repeating like mantras since last night.
We broke up for a reason. Femi and I could never get back together. It was impossible. We wanted different things. It would never work.
The problem with that philosophy was that the memory of us was so good. We had been amazing together. I loved and cherished every moment I spent with him. Sometimes I wondered if that was the reason I hadn’t dated since Femi. He’d left a mark on my soul I couldn’t scrub away, a Femi-shaped hole that no one else seemed to fit.
But I couldn’t forget the Why’s. Why we broke up. Why we couldn’t be together. Why we wouldn’t work out, no matter how good the chemistry was.
I couldn’t go down that road. Recovering had been very painful, months of crying, of not eating, of throwing myself into work until I was too exhausted to feel anything. Going through that again would be pure torture.
My phone buzzed in my bag. I pulled it out to see an interesting notification.
Aria added you to a groupchat: Wedding Planning Girls!
I stared at it. Already? It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since Sebastian proposed. The man had barely gotten the ring on her finger and Aria was already in full wedding-planning mode.
Another notification popped up, from Kim this time.
In: Wedding Planning Girls!
Kim: Aria, we’re starting now? I’m pulling out my spreadsheets already.
Aria: Yep! Let’s get this show on the road!
Me: I literally just landed in London. Can we start planning tomorrow?
Aria: Nope, right now. Let’s jump on a quick call guys.
My phone started ringing before I could stop it from happening. I sighed, a long, suffering sigh that came from somewhere deep in my soul, but answered anyway. Two smiling faces filled my screen, their enthusiasm almost painful to witness.
