Chapter 12

Juliana

 

 

“Well, look who made it home last night,” I muttered under my breath the next morning. Scott smelled like a pirate in bed next to me. Smoke, rum, and Lord only knew what else was seeping from his pores. He absolutely reeked.

Leaning over to his side of the bed, I poked him, but he didn’t stir. As I’d suspected, he was passed out cold and wouldn’t wake up, despite the amount of shaking I tried and the many times I repeated his name.

He was still fully dressed, though his jeans were wrinkled and his T-shirt was dirty. Having kicked off his shoes, his socks looked kind of crusty and gross, and his hair stood up in every direction. His pallor was off, some splotches of his skin a vivid red and the rest a scary gray that I didn’t want to know the cause of.

Passed out as he was, he’d fallen asleep whenever he’d gotten in, still holding his phone. It buzzed with an incoming message. It was short, and the whole thing was visible on his screen without even the need to unlock it.

Amber: I love you, baby.

With three kissy face emoticons.

And there I had it. My best friend was, in fact, fucking my boyfriend, and apparently in love with him.

I’d kissed a guy and, okay, I’d liked it. But I was planning on telling Scott about it when I talked to him, which I’d been planning to do today. It was nothing near as bad as this, though. ‘I love you, baby’ didn’t happen after one kiss.

Nor did ignoring your girlfriend repeatedly while talking to her best friend. No, whatever this was, it was much, much more than that.

That had been my one ultimatum to Scott. He’d promised me that he’d left his philandering, stick-your-cock-into-everything days behind when we got together. I told him that fucking someone else was a deal breaker for me.

Despite recent events, I wasn’t a cheater. Never had been. That one kiss was the closest I’d ever come. Scott knew that I wouldn’t put up with cheating, and it was time to put words into action.

One time, when he’d stayed out all night, I’d told him that he better not have been fucking around on me. He told me that after I’d left our friend’s house, he and Amber had ended up getting drunk at Rennie’s.

Babe, he’d said. I was with Amber. Ask her. I didn’t leave her side all night.

And of course, I’d called her, and she’d confirmed that he was with her until he’d stumbled into our house at six o’ clock the following morning.

What a blind idiot I’d been.

But this was Amber, for God’s sake. She was my best friend, my confidante. The girl I’d taken my first shot with, studied with, bitched to, and celebrated with. The first call I’d made after losing my virginity, got my job, and started dating Scott.

It seems I wasn’t the first call she’d made after starting to date him too.

That thought spurred me into action. That same morning, I had told him that if he had been fucking around on me, he was out on his ass. I’d told him that I knew that he’d strung girlfriends along in the past and that if he tried it with me, he was looking at his next ex-girlfriend.

It was time to make those words come true. I spent the morning throwing his shit into whatever boxes I had lying around, and by the time he woke up, I had him all packed up.

Nudging him with my toe while holding onto a steaming cup of coffee, for me—not for him, he finally opened his eyes. For the first time ever, I was repulsed by his cloudy blues. They were watery and rimmed with red so deep it looked like he was bleeding into his eyeballs.

But his well-being was Amber’s problem now.

“Juliebean,” he croaked, nodding to my coffee. “For me?”

“Nope,” I said, louder than was necessary. Scott winced. “Time to take your shit and get out, loverboy. Tell Ambi I said not to bother calling.”

He repeated his infuriating mantra from the night before. “Don’t be like that now, Julie. You’re my one and only, Juliebean. Come give me a kiss. I’ll make it all up to you.”

God, how had I thought that he was charming for so long? I gagged a little at him now.

“I hate being called Juliebean, FYI. And you’re out of luck, asshole. I know about you and Amber. If either of you ever step into this house again, I’ll have you arrested for trespassing.”

“That’s bullshit, babe. I live here. Amber and I are just friends.”

“No, you used to live here,” I corrected him. “And I saw her text; she loves you baby.”

“It’s nothing, Jules.” His face betrayed him; it wasn’t nothing. Not that I’d thought for one second that it was. “Christ, my head. Could you get me some water and some aspirin, then we’ll talk?”

“Nope. Done talking. Done getting you shit. It’s all over, Scott. Time for you to leave.”

“What?” he yelped, only now just waking up fully.

I was over talking to him, and I wasn’t joking about that. I had tried it, though. Now it was over to plan B. I marched out of the bedroom and heard him scurrying after me. One by one, I started throwing his boxes out onto my front lawn to get him to leave.

He rushed past me onto the lawn, a loud, “FUUUUUUUCK,” ripping from his chest as he did so. He frantically started digging through his boxes, looking for something while he flipped out on me, calling me everything from a motherfucking bitch to a thief.

Although I was curious about what he was looking for, I was also disgusted by him. All disheveled, still dirty from the night before, knees soaked through from the wet grass, he looked nothing if not pathetic.

Scott also hadn’t said sorry or anything close to it once. Not about anything. All he cared about was his stupid stuff, not me breaking up with him at all. The last of his boxes landed with a thud next to one of the others, and I slammed the door shut, not able to believe that I’d gotten into a situation where I lived with that.

With a brief reminder to have the locks changed as soon as Monday rolled around, I went for the ice cream in my freezer, flipped the A/C on high in my living room, and spent the rest of the day swaddled in a stolen airplane blanket while I lost myself in the lives of my onscreen friends.

Usually, I went out every night on the weekend and several times during the week, but even though it was only Saturday, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house that night. I tried to immerse myself in my show, but as hard as I tried, images of Scott and Amber kept popping up in my head.

Images of Scott with Amber.

Gah! My best friend with my boyfriend.

Ex-boyfriend, but whatever.

While I’d been worrying about Scott, and confiding in Amber, they’d both been busy stabbing me in the back. The betrayal felt like a stab right to my heart. With a hot-to-the-point-of-melting arrow. What made it impossibly worse was the fact that the one person I counted on to talk stuff like this through with was a party to it.

I didn’t care how rocky things had been with Scott at the end there, how could they both have gone behind my back like this?

It sucked. It was awful. I hated it, and I felt so damn powerless it hurt.