“Where have you been?” Danika’s voice floods into my bedroom at one o’clock in the afternoon on Friday. I drag the pillow over my head and tell her to go away.
But she doesn’t budge. When I pull the pillow back, she’s still standing there, hands on hips, glaring at me with that stern-mother look that I normally find endearing. But today I just want to slap it off her face.
“I have been calling you since Tuesday. Do you know how worried I’ve been? You haven’t returned any of my text messages or called me back. At first I assumed you were just knee-deep in some divine shag fest in New York, but after a few days I started to think maybe you were dead.”
“I’m sorry,” I murmur, and as soon as Danika hears the crack in my voice, her face softens.
She lowers herself onto the bed. “Uh-oh. What happened?”
I turn my head to the side, staring at my shuttered window as the tears sting my eyes. “He chose her.”
“WHAT?” Danika bellows.
I shake my head. “He chose her. Like he’s always chosen her. Like everyone in the world will always choose her.”
“But…” she begins to argue, her voice tripping on her own disbelief. “I don’t understand. He said—”
“I know what he said,” I snap, “and I’m telling you, he changed his mind. I’m no match for Alex and her stupid fucking spellbinding perfection. I never will be.”
“Spellbinding perfection?” Danika snorts. “Hardly.”
“It’s true!” I argue, “Alex is flawless. She does everything better. She looks better, she smells better, hell, she probably even fucks better.”
“Oh. Shut UP already!” Danika cries.
I am startled by her sudden brusqueness. She’s never spoken to me like that in our entire fifteen-year friendship.
“Dani—” I start to protest.
“No,” she barks. “Listen to me. You need to stop this. Right now. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Stop acting like you’re some kind of ugly hag who lives in a shoe. And for the love of God, stop comparing yourself to Alex! You put her on this ridiculous pedestal. You act like she’s some kind of untouchable goddess sent from the heavens. It’s sick! You need to get over this unhealthy obsession you have with your sister.”
“I’m not obsessed with my sister,” I retort, repulsed at the thought. “I just don’t think it’s fair that she always wins. That she got all the superior genes.”
Danika throws her hands in the air. “YOU ARE BETTER THAN HER!”
I roll my eyes and slink deeper under the covers. “No, I’m not.”
“You are funny and compassionate and gorgeous and creative and, most of all, you are loyal!”
The emphasis she puts on the last word pulls me up short. I shoot her a suspicious glance. “What do you mean, I’m loyal. If anything, I’m not loyal. I cheated with my sister’s fiancé.”
But she shakes her head. “No. He cheated. You didn’t have anyone to cheat on.”
“Thanks for the reminder,” I mumble through my teeth.
Danika sighs and stands up. At first I think she’s going to leave, but instead, she digs her hand deep into her pocket and produces her phone. She swipes her finger decisively across the screen several times then shoves the device in my face.
“THERE is your perfect saintly sister.”
It takes a moment for my eyes to focus on the image in front of me, but once they do, I let out a gasp and launch upright, snatching the phone from Danika’s hand and using my fingers to zoom in on the photo.
“What the fuck?”
Danika crosses her arms over her chest, looking proud of herself. “If you had just called me back, I could have shown you these days ago. Keep going, there are more.”
I swipe to the next photo and zoom in again.
I just can’t believe what I’m seeing.
It’s Alex, wearing a low-cut dress and four-inch heels. And she’s tangled around some guy, her head tossed back as he buries his face in her neck.
“Where was this?” I ask, gawking at the screen.
“Hank’s,” she tells me, sitting back down on the bed.
“When?”
“Tuesday afternoon. I slipped in for a drink while Ava was at ballet and saw them.”
“Tuesday afternoon? But that’s when she was supposed to be in San Francisco.”
I let out a shriek as the truth strikes me like an asteroid.
She never went. The business trip was a lie. A cover. She probably never even got on the train back to the city.
“Who is she with?” I ask. But as I swipe to the next photo, the answer is suddenly revealed to me.
I recognize his surfer blond hair and long, angular face instantly.
“Blake?” I ask aloud. “My bartender?”
The implications of my sister cheating with not just any bartender but the bartender from my mother’s restaurant are making my head spin. I can’t wrap my brain around the totally messed-up psychology of this.
Fucking Alex.
It’s not enough she took Grayson from me eight years ago. Now she wants Blake, too.
Not that I had any serious interest in him, but she didn’t know that. All she knew was that the two of us were hitting it off at the bar on Sunday night. Then she had to swoop in and prove that, when given the choice, boys will always choose her.
As if I needed any reminder of her superiority.
“So,” Danika prompts. “What are you going to do?”
I toss the phone into the sheets and collapse back. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?” she echoes incredulously.
I shrug. “What can I do?”
“Um, you could tell Grayson, for starters.”
“Why? So he can choose me by default? So I can be his runner-up? No thank you. Alex is his problem. Not mine. He made his decision and now he has to live with it.”
I expect Danika to argue further but she doesn’t. She just scoops her phone back up and returns it to her pocket. “Okay,” she allows, “if that’s what you want.”
I want to scream at her. To shout at the top of my lungs that none of this is what I want. That nothing in my life ever happens the way I want. But I refrain. Partly because I know she’ll just scold me again for feeling sorry for myself, but mostly because I just don’t have the energy to shout.