Cole signaled to the bartender as he polished off his bottle of beer, wondering vaguely how many he’d had, how many it would take to take to banish all taste of Ivy from his mouth, all thoughts of her from his mind.

He hadn’t had nearly enough for that to work. Maybe he should switch to liquor.

“You might want to take it easy, there, buddy,” the bartender recommended. “Wouldn’t want you to get hurt tonight.”

“Too late,” Cole said, morose, accepting the beer the bartender reluctantly gave up. “I’m not driving.”

“First smart thing you’ve said all night,” the bartender said, leaving him alone to his dark rumination in favor of some happier people on the other end of the bar.

Cole didn’t blame him. He couldn’t blame anyone, really. He was in a dark place right now, and that was because he’d plunged forward too deep, too fast. It was a rookie mistake, and one he should’ve avoided. He should’ve known better. He had known better. But he’d rushed into it because he’d listened to his heart instead of his head.

He barely knew Ivy. That should’ve served as the first red flag. Who just fell in love like that with someone they barely knew? He couldn’t even come up with a middle name for her. He didn’t know if her parents had given her one. He didn’t know her parents’ names, either. Or her favorite color. Whether she had a pet, even if he hadn’t seen any sign of one at her apartment.

What Cole did know was the smell of her hair the first thing in the morning. He could close his eyes and sniff a dozen heads and be able to pull Ivy out of a lineup. What did that mean, that he knew the scent of her better than any mundane fact someone could recite? Was that better, or worse?

What was worse was that he was going to run out of beer again. Though he suspected that there might not be enough beer in this bar—let alone D.C.—to put him out of his misery when it came to Ivy.

He looked up, his eyes dry and slow to respond to what he wanted them to do. The bartender pointedly ignored him. Continuing to drown his sorrows here was probably a lost cause. All he could try to do was sober up and see if he could get himself to another bar, where the bartender would sling him at least a couple beers before realizing Cole had had enough.

“Where is the party, man? Why didn’t you invite me?”

Cole frowned to himself before swiveling carefully on his stool. Turning too fast felt like a bad idea. His bleary eyes confirmed what his ears had picked up on. Jason Singleton was back, standing in front of him, arms crossed across his chest. Looking kind of disappointed, actually.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Cole demanded, hoping he wasn’t so drunk he’d started hallucinating. “You’re not supposed to be back already, are you?”

Jason shrugged, relieved Cole of his beer, and took a quick gulp before Cole could wrestle it back into his possession. “Doesn’t matter. I’m here. Mission’s over. You going to save some beer in this town for those of us still serving?”

Cole grunted. “Plenty for everyone.”

“Not with the way it looks like you’re drinking.” Jason tapped a finger against one of the many empty bottles lined up along the bar. “Bartender can’t even keep up with you.”

“Busy night.”

Jason laughed. “You’re so full of shit. Can’t you look past your own misery to see you’re one of the only ones left here?”

Cole blinked his bleary eyes up and down the bar. Jason was right. It had to be close to last call. Or maybe last call had been and gone and the bartender hadn’t had the heart to cut him off officially.

“Bartender probably left all those bottles out to try and bring you to your senses,” Jason mused. “Or else to try to encourage a little shame out of you.”

“Just beer,” Cole said. He’d had a lot more than this on many more occasions, Jason right at his side, blitzed and happy. Why was tonight any different?

“Come on, man,” Jason cajoled. “I’ve been gone for weeks and all you’ve got for me is these short answers? You going to tell me what I did to piss you off, or am I going to have to guess?”

“You didn’t piss me off.”

“No, no. You’re being coy. I’m going to guess, now.” Jason rubbed the stubble on his chin. Had he even gone home before finding Cole here? “You finally realized that I’ve been putting every other one of my beers on your tab.”

“No.” Cole narrowed his eyes. “Wait, what?”

“Never mind,” Jason said quickly. “So you figured out I’ve been telling girls you’ve been talking to, once you go to the restroom, that you’re engaged and being a good wingman for me, and that’s why you’ve been unlucky in love lately.”

“If that’s true, it’s ridiculous.”

Cole spluttered a laugh at Jason even as he sagged on the barstool. Unlucky in love was right. He’d thought he had something special with Ivy. How could she be playing him so thoroughly? What kind of a person did something like that? He just couldn’t wrap his mind around it. It didn’t make sense how deep she’d plunged the knife. How she’d twisted it.

“I’m just trying to distract you from whatever’s eating you from the inside out,” Jason said. “None of that’s true.”

“I knew it wasn’t. Hey.” Cole scowled. “There was a girl, once. A redhead. I tried to talk to her after I came back to the table and she said I should be ashamed of myself.”

Jason grimaced. “It was one time.”

“What, so I should be watching my tab around you now?” Cole glared. “Is that why you always drink whatever I’m having?”

“Why are we making this about me?” Jason asked, holding his hands up. “I just wanted to know what was going on with you.”

But now Cole was really laughing, halfway horrified at the audacity of his best friend. “You asshole.”

“You say that like you’re genuinely surprised.” Jason swiped Cole’s beer and downed the rest, ignoring Cole’s protests.

“Get your own,” Cole groused. “That one’s mine.”

“I’ll get my own—and another for you. And I’ll put it on my tab, too, if you tell me what’s got you chained to this bar tonight.”

Cole waved him off. “It’s nothing.”

“Cole. You’re sitting in a bar, by yourself, attempting to drink it dry.” Jason signaled to the bartender. “It’s not nothing. Could you at least humor a man who just got back from a nightmare of a mission?”

“Jesus Christ. Tell me about the mission.” Cole was mortified he hadn’t asked Jason prior to this point of the conversation. It was just that he’d been so surprised to see his friend—and still so floored by everything that had happened with Ivy.

“You know damn well I can’t do that,” Jason said. “Especially not with you as practically a civilian, now.”

“Not official, yet,” Cole said. Maybe he should go back into active duty. Abandon this whole retirement thing. Live life dangerously with women in every port again. “You said it was a nightmare.”

“And I wasn’t lying. It was such a nightmare that I came out looking for you to try and distract me from everything that happened.” Jason took a seat on the barstool beside Cole and took a swig of the fresh beer the bartender brought. “So, you going to distract me, or what?”

It was the least Cole could do to get his friend’s mind off of the mission. Cole knew how hard it was to re-enter civilian life after a tough job. Sometimes, it had been impossible to take himself out of the jungles or off the beaches. It took an immense amount of support from his friends. And Jason deserved a good friend right about now.

“You’re going to laugh at me,” Cole warned.

“Somehow, I kind of doubt it.” Jason flicked his fingers against each of the empty bottles in the row on the bar. “There’s something about the sheer volume of the beer you’ve consumed that isn’t funny at all to me.”

“There’s this girl…”

“Ah, hell. I’ll stop you right there.” Jason gripped his shoulder. “Do you need a shot? Is this a whiskey shot kind of story?”

Cole paused to consider. “I don’t think I could stomach whiskey right now.”

“Good man. Accept your limitations. Tell me more about this girl. Is this the one you sent that dopey email about to me?”

Cole nodded. It felt like his head dangled from a string someone else controlled. “She’s great. Or she was. Gorgeous. Amazing. I thought we had this thing.”

Jason leaned closer. “What kind of thing?”

“I don’t know. A real thing. But it turns out she was just stringing me along this entire time.”

“Just take tonight to drown your sorrows, and get over it,” Jason counseled. “There isn’t anything else you can do but move forward. Plenty of fish in the sea.”

“It was a real thing.” Cole looked into the mouth of his beer bottle. There wasn’t enough liquid sloshing around down there. There would never be enough. “I don’t want to get over it. You’re going to make fun of me, but I thought she was the one.”

Jason frowned. “Why would I make fun of you for that?”

Cole gave a half-shrug. “You’re the one who never takes dating seriously. You get a different girl every night. You probably think I’m ridiculous.”

“If it makes you happy, it’s not ridiculous,” Jason said. “Why the hell do you care what I think about your dating life in the first place?”

“You’re my friend.”

Jason sighed, relenting, as he pounded Cole’s back. “I am your friend. You know what? I’m such a good friend that I’m going to help you get this all figured out. Tell me exactly what happened with this dream girl of yours. What do you mean, she strung you along?”

Cole couldn’t ignore the rush of gratitude he felt toward Jason. He’d held back at first. But now that his friend had offered to help him sift through the debris of his relationship with Ivy, Cole was starting to realize that he really, really wanted to talk about it.

“Everything was going great,” he said. “We’d just agreed to go official. But then I saw her phone—”

“Wait, what do you mean, you saw her phone?”

“I mean that I picked up her phone, and saw the text messages on it, and—”

“Cole Hardcastle.” Jason gave him a stony look. “Do you mean to tell me you were snooping on this poor girl’s phone?”

“No!” Cole exclaimed. “It was vibrating. I went to hand it to her, and happened to glance down at the screen as a message came through, and saw the whole string of them. All of it was sex.”

Jason nearly choked on his beer. “What?”

“It was all these different guys from all these different numbers texting her,” Cole explained. “And some of the messages implied that she’d been texting them back. With sexy things.”

“I’m still having trouble believing that you didn’t snoop on her phone.” Jason gave him a look. “How did you have all this time to analyze the messages if you just got a peek at the screen?”

“Because once you’ve seen a message that says ‘Ivy, tell me what you want me to do after I rub my dick between your tits,’ it sort of sticks with you. It’s burned into my brain. It’s all I’ve been able to think about.”

Jason’s mouth hung open. “Fuck.”

“Yeah, that about sums it up. All of the text messages. The whole situation.” Cole sighed. It might’ve felt good, for a moment, to vent his frustrations, but now he was back to square one. “Do you think she’s stringing along all those other guys, too?”

Jason either didn’t hear his question, or wasn’t listening. “Did you say her name was Ivy?”

Cole blinked. “Yeah. Wait. Do not tell me you were one of the guys she was texting. Not even as a joke. I will not hear it right now.”

“No, no, nothing like that,” Jason said, apparently in earnest. Cole could practically hear the gears whirring inside of his skull. “Not from me, at least.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Is this the same Ivy who messaged you the morning I returned your phone to you?” Jason was studying Cole closely, eyes burning with an intense focus. “You know, the morning after your big retirement bar crawl?”

Cole winced a little at the memory of the hangover—and in anticipation of the nastiness that awaited him tomorrow morning, too. These beers were going to remind him of all his despair in just a few short hours. If anything, though, the memory of texting back and forth with Ivy that hungover morning was the most painful thing of all. It had been an instant connection. Was she just that good at texting? Was that why all those guys were contacting her?

“Yeah, that’s her,” Cole confirmed. “We’ve been seeing each other ever since then.”

Jason laughed, and Cole saw red.

“Goddammit!” Cole raged. “I should’ve known better than to trust you with this. You can fuck right off.”

“Cole, you have to listen to me,” Jason said, all but imploring. “I’m not laughing at you, I swear to God. I’m only laughing at the situation.”

Cole wasn’t sure how that was any better.

“Remember how I found your phone that night?” Jason asked.

Cole gave a curt nod, still unsure where any of this was going.

“I thought it would be a good idea—look, I was drunk, too, in my defense—to sign you up for this thing called Whisper Line.”

“What the hell is a Whisper Line?”

“Somebody had stuck a flier for it in the bathroom,” Jason said. “It’s a phone sex service. I thought it would be funny to sign you up for it.”

Cole frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“Ivy.” Jason held his hands out, waiting for Cole’s drunken brain to catch up. “She works for Whisper Line. As a phone sex operator.”

“I was just a job to her?”

“I said she was a phone operator, not a prostitute. You’ve been seeing her? Like in person?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m pretty sure she doesn’t think that you’re a job. Or that she’s been stringing you—or anyone else—along.”

Cole considered this, his heart pounding, the adrenaline coursing through his veins working to clear some of the cobwebs from his beer-soaked brain. Ivy’s sexting game had been on point when they first messaged each other. And the other texts he’d seen on her phone, the ones coming in from all those strange numbers, they had been almost ludicrously over the top.

But the most important point of all was that, for Ivy, if what Jason was saying was true, it was all business. She wasn’t maintaining relationships with a dozen or more other people. Cole was the only one she was with. And he had behaved like a giant asshole just walking out on her like that, without giving her a chance to explain. He thought she’d just use excuses, or ridiculous stories to try to explain away the string of sexts on her phone. But the more Cole thought about it, the more he suspected that if he’d stuck around, she would’ve told him a different story.

“Cole?” Jason reached out a tentative hand. “You still here with me?”

Cole laughed wildly. “I’m going to kick your ass, you son of a bitch.”

“Whoa, whoa. Not the response I was anticipating.”

“You signed me up for a fucking sex hotline?” Cole couldn’t stop laughing. He wasn’t sure if it was the beer or the shock or the relief that Ivy hadn’t betrayed him after all.

“From what it sounds like,” Jason said, carefully edging off the barstool, putting a little space between the two of them, “I think I signed you up for a sex hotline and introduced you to your girlfriend at the same time.”

“You are unbelievable.” Cole was starting to get concerned that he wasn’t going to be able to stop laughing anytime soon. “I literally am having trouble believing any of this right now.”

“You could start by thanking me.”

“I’ll thank you with this fist,” Cole said, shaking his closed hand at his friend. “Whisper Line? Is that really what it’s called?”

“Yeah, it is.” Jason took a seat at a stool farther down the bar. “Look it up. Hell, look in your bank account. They probably charged you an arm and a leg for that first text.”

Cole fumbled with his phone, swiping at the display. His fingers felt way too big and awkward for this. “Shit. You do it. I can’t type anything.”

“You are pathetic.” But Jason took his phone without further comment and found the Whisper Line website for Cole, who clumsily explored it. Success stories. Increases in intimacy. Real operators standing by. A photo gallery of the girls potential clients could look forward to chatting with.

And right there, for all the world to see, was Ivy. It was just plain Ivy—no surname—but it was her blond hair, her green eyes. Her smile, which brightened her entire face. There was a link to click, and an agreement that, if he filled it out and submitted it, promised to connect Cole to Ivy’s direct line.

“I thought she was the prettiest one,” Jason said, peering over Cole’s shoulder at the other thumbnails on the website. “The one who would push you the most out of your comfort zone.”

God, had it really been as random as that? The girl Jason thought was hot ending up being the one he’d fall in love with?

“I really am wavering in between hugging you and strangling you,” he informed Jason. His friend put his hands up and slowly backed away.

“Let me know when you veer more toward hugging,” Jason said.

“I have to talk to her,” Cole said.

“So talk. You probably have a lot of apologies to make.”

Cole nodded. “A lot. I ruined dinner this evening. A special one. She had something important she wanted to tell me.”

“Do you have any idea what that something might’ve been?”

“No.”

“Well, you could reconnect with her over that. Tell her you’re ready to hear whatever she was going to tell you. And that of course you’re sorry for ruining the dinner she’d made. What’d she make you?”

“There was steak.”

“You jackass.”

“I know.”

Cole had a sudden brainwave, and quickly—or as quickly as his too-thick fingers allowed—punched in the requisite information on the Whisper Line form and submitted it. He’d tell Ivy he was sorry through here. That he’d figured out the reason behind all the sexts on her phone. That he was okay with it. That he was an absolute idiot for making her feel bad, and for walking out on her like that.

But an error message popped up on his phone. “User not active,” it read. “Try another operator.”

“What does this mean?” Cole asked, showing his phone to Jason.

“I don’t know. Maybe she quit.”

Cole frowned. “Because of me?” He didn’t like the way that felt, that his reaction to that portion of Ivy’s life had pushed her into making a rash decision. He wondered just how lucrative the job was.

“You can’t know for certain unless you actually talk to her.” Jason stopped Cole from punching in Ivy’s number on his phone. “In person would probably work best for this.”

“I’ll go right now,” Cole said, standing up a little too fast from his seat and swaying a bit.

“Easy.” Jason was right there at his side. “You’re going to want to do this sober. I sincerely doubt Ivy would want to talk to you right now, in this condition. Especially with the way you smell—Christ!”

“I don’t smell bad.”

“You smell like the bottom of a mop pail, but only if someone had been mopping with stale beer.”

Cole spluttered. “That doesn’t even make any sense.”

“And neither do you right now. Go home. Sober up. And go in there first thing in the morning and get that girl back. She’s good for you.”

“Thanks, man.” Cole nearly crashed into Jason, wrapping him up in a powerful embrace. “You’re a good friend.”

“I know I am. Doing all this matchmaking and advice-giving. Maybe I should retire from the Navy, too. Be a life coach. Get rich.”

“Maybe…” Cole said, but his dubious tone just made Jason laugh so hard the bartender glared at them.