I was bitter and I was angry.
It was comparable to that moment in sex where the guy comes, and you don’t. We’d all been there, some of us, unfortunately, more than others. It was also up there with the realization that you’ve watched too much porn because you’re disappointed that your plumber isn’t young and hot but married and a grandfather.
Just me?
Moving on.
Yes. I was bitter and I was angry.
Sleeping and Mimi’s waffles hadn’t lessened the initial burst of anger that had slammed into me at Elliott’s admission.
I hated myself. Dramatic, but that was how I felt right now. He’d lost his grandma, and I’d just been too damn stubborn and prideful to listen to when he tried to explain to me.
More to the point, I’d taken the hurt and ran with it.
I hadn’t ever thought about whether or not him standing me up was in his nature. If it was something a nice guy would do without reason.
“Well, shit,” Chloe said when I was done giving the recap.
Mellie whistled low. “Now, what?”
“Now, we fucked up,” Chloe muttered.
“That, too.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s kind of the theme here.” I leaned forward on my desk, almost knocking over my coffee. “Ugh, you guys. You’re assholes. Why did you match me with him? Can I blame you for this?”
“You can try, but give it ten years, and you’ll be all pissed off again.” Chloe sipped from her drink. “What are you most mad about?”
I rolled my head to the side and looked at them. “Myself.”
Mellie raised her eyebrows so high they disappeared beneath her bangs. “Are you admitting you were…wrong?”
Wow. My friends knew how to kick a girl when she was down.
“No. I’m considering the fact I may have been too stubborn, but not wrong.” I wasn’t going to give them that much satisfaction.
They were my best friends. They didn’t need satisfaction today. They needed to feel my pain. That was how friendship worked.
I mean, when I was seven, I deliberately got chicken pox so I could still go to Chloe’s house.
If I could get pox for her, they could do this for me.
“Well,” Chloe said, “As a rule, you’re always stubborn.”
“No, I’m not,” I replied. “I take breaks on Wednesdays.”
“Peyt.” Mellie fought a laugh. “Anyone who responds to, “you’re stubborn” with a denial, is a stubborn piece of ass.”
“No, they’re—” I caught myself before I proved her point further. “You’re supposed to be here to help me. I’m in a crisis.”
“Running out of toilet paper is a crisis to you.”
“Have you ever sat on the toilet to poop, then ran out of toilet paper while your phone rings?” I raised an eyebrow. “I don’t want to speak to someone when I’m pooping. I want Buzzfeed to tell me what breed of cat I’ll be in my next life.”
“Can you link me to that?” Chloe asked.
Mellie shot her an unamused look. “Chloe.”
“What? I poop, too.”
“Can we get back to me?” I sat up and waved my arms. “You guys, this is a nightmare. This isn’t how this was supposed to go. We had a plan. Go in, get laid three times, bank five hundred dollars. Not go in, meet high school nemesis, wash his sick kid’s hair, find out you hated him for no reason, and get fucked.”
Mellie shrugged. “Getting fucked was always the plan.”
“Literally. Not metaphorically.” I slumped forward again and ran both hands through my hair. “This is a disaster. What do I do? Dom knows about Elliott. He knows we slept together. I can’t back out now. But how can I have sex with him knowing my hate was unjustified? Oh, God. I need Mardi Gras back so I can get blind drunk and sleep with a tourist.”
Chloe cough-snorted, then leaned over to Mellie. “Hey, Mel. Can you Google the price of a train ticket to Pityville for an adult?”
I flipped her the bird. “Seriously. Think about it like this. I’ve hated him for ten years because of what he did to me—or what I thought he did. He didn’t do it. The only reason I never found out was because I was stubborn as hell and wouldn’t listen to him when he wanted to explain. I literally hurt myself because I was so up myself.
“Sixty seconds. That’s all he would have needed to tell me the truth, and I couldn’t set aside how I felt for one fucking minute to listen to him. He lost his grandmother, and I had a giant stick up my ass.”
My best friends looked at me. They both just sat deathly still, their eyes on me. There was sympathy in them, but there was also the one thing I didn’t have.
The outside perspective.
Of being the people who saw everything in a way I never could, because my feelings had always clouded my judgment.
“And he really, really hurt you,” Mellie said softly after a moment of silence. “Peyt, you didn’t know. You acted based on the information you had available to you and—”
“I had it available. I chose not to listen to it.”
“We were kids!” Chloe said a little too loud. She must have realized she almost yelled because she took a deep breath and held up her hands. “We were kids. We were seventeen, for fuck’s sake. We were young. We were stupid. We were immature. Don’t hate yourself for what you did then.”
“I hate myself for sleeping with Daniel Wynn,” Mellie offered.
“And so you should,” Chloe replied. “But that was a sober, educated, fully-informed choice that is not helpful right now.”
Despite it all, I smiled.
Actually, it was helpful. Because for a moment, I didn’t hate myself for the choice I’d made.
I remembered just how freaking dumb we were in high school. How we made decisions on the fly with nothing more than emotions and hormones to guide us.
I blamed algebra for that. My days were so full of Y trying to find his X that I couldn’t focus on anything else.
Mostly because I am not a math girl.
“Oh, man,” I said, shaking my head. “What am I supposed to do now?”
Mellie sighed. “Do you have a multiple-choice option?”
“Yes. Whine, cry, get drunk, masturbate.”
“So…A normal menstrual cycle for you, then,” Chloe offered with a grin.
“I…” I paused. “Yeah. Pretty much.” I let out a long breath and sat back in my chair, pulling my take-out coffee off the coaster toward me. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’m in trouble. He’s not the person I thought he was in high school. Or maybe he is because apparently, I didn’t know who he was.”
Neither of them said anything, again. We all sat, none of us making eye contact. Mellie stared at my computer, Chloe chewed her thumbnail and stared at the awkward heart canvases that were on my wall.
Awkward because one looked like a penis… and another like a vagina. The other was a legit heart.
Pretty much.
There were no answers. None.
I didn’t know how to deal with this, and that was beyond comprehension for me. I’d never been in a situation I couldn’t control.
At least not one that had blindsided me the way this one had.
“I think you need to talk to him,” Chloe said. “The only way you’ll figure this all out is if you both talk it through.”
I hated talking. I wasn’t a talker. I was a doer.
“Great. That can’t possibly go wrong,” I muttered, grabbing my phone. I pulled up my messages, then our text chain, and tapped the reply box.
Me: We need to talk. Tonight.
His response was swift.
Elliott: We do. Mom is coming to my house to watch B. At yours?
Me: Whenever you’re ready.
Elliott: I’ll put B to bed then come over. I’ll text you when I’m leaving.
Me: K.
If I lost this bet because I talked to him, I was going to book a flight the hell away from this planet. I bet Elon Musk would be able to hook a girl up.
If only he could have delayed the Tesla thing. I’d have been more than happy to travel through space in his car.
More than that, this situation had turned me into the kind of person I hated most.
The “k” person.
Ugh.
***
I was out of wine and donuts.
My foot was dancing to an imaginary beat. The nervous taps were the only sound in the room as I read through the application of a single mom who wanted to get out more now her son was getting older.
I wasn’t the person she was after, I could tell, so I wrote her a very sweet email explaining that Stupid Cupid could probably help her more.
It happened more often than people would think. They email me for no-strings, but the undertone of their email said they wanted strings. They didn’t just want sex—they wanted the cuddling that came after.
I hadn’t minored in psychology for nothing.
The fact the professor had been hot was a bonus.
All right. I minored because of the professor. It was like eighteen-year-old Peyton knew I’d need the life skills one day.
And it was really, really handy when it came to avoiding the assholes. Except my friends.
And myself.
I stared up at the blank TV screen on the other side of my office. I needed to put Friends on it or something, but I couldn’t stand the angst levels. Right now, I just wanted a montage of Joey with food or Pheobe’s comments.
None of the Ross and Rachel bullshit. And that was a lot of bullshit.
I sighed and leaned back in my chair. My email pinged with three more notifications, but they were just submissions from guys. I’d looked at approximately eighty different dicks today, and I was done with that.
I shut the laptop.
Waiting for Elliott was driving me insane. I was antsy and anxious—I had no idea how this conversation was going to do, and more than anything, I was afraid of how it would go.
I was afraid it would go well. That would make proving my brother wrong impossible.
This whole idea had been a stupid one from the start.
Why was I so obsessed with the idea of proving him wrong? Surely I could just tell Elliott I was done and tell Dom to go and fuck himself.
I picked up my phone. That was what I was going to do. I was going to put an end to the experiment that was causing me unnecessary stress.
I was Peyton Austin. I didn’t get stressed. I was dramatic, but not prone to stress.
Yet, here I was, more stressed than I’d ever been in my life.
This was why people used my website to hook up without strings. Emotions were of the devil.
And the devil was a whore.
I opened my phone and pulled up my messages with Elliott for the second time today. My thumb tapped the box just as a bubble popped up on his side of the screen.
Elliott: I think your doorbell is broken.
It was. But how did he—
Shit. He was here already.
I dropped my phone like it was burning me and ran downstairs. Thankfully, I was barefoot, so I wasn’t slipping on the floor. If I were Mellie, she’d have gone down the stairs on her ass.
I hesitated before I opened the door. I’d rushed down here as if a hungry werewolf was on my heels, and now I was frozen like the big chicken I was.
Dear God. Only a few days ago I’d had his dick in my mouth, and now I couldn’t open the door to him.
I was not good at being a good adult.
“Peyton, I heard you in there. Open the door before your neighbors call the cops on me.” Laughter laced his tone.
“But if they call the cops, I won’t have to open it.” I wasn’t supposed to say that out loud. Crap.
He laughed. “You’re the one who said we need to talk. Let me in.”
Well, there it was. I had no choice.
Welcome to Hell, Peyton.
I ran my hand through my hair as I opened the door. Chewing the inside of my cheek, I met his eyes. “Hey.”
“Hey.” He was leaning against the doorframe. His hands were tucked into the pockets of his light-blue jeans, and his white t-shirt was a little dirty on the sleeve.
“You know you’ve got a mark on your shirt?”
“I have a child. I’m more surprised if I leave the house without anything on my shirt.”
“Fair enough. Um, come in?” I walked backward, almost tripping over my purse where I’d left it on the floor.
“How was your day?” Elliott asked, tinging the air with the awkwardness of small talk.
“Long. Yours? Do you want coffee?” I shuffled into the kitchen. Why were my palms sweating?
What was this madness?
I wiped my hands on my butt and turned on the coffee machine. “Coffee?”
“You already asked me that.” His lips twitched up to the side. “Peyton…Are you nervous?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I pulled two mugs down from the cupboard and set them on the side. “You didn’t answer, that’s all, so I repeated myself.”
“You’re a dreadful liar.”
“Actually, I’m a very good liar.”
“All right, that wasn’t such a bad lie.”
I shot a withering look over my shoulder and replaced the pod in the coffee machine.
“I don’t need a coffee. I’m good. But thank you.”
“Oh. Okay.” I didn’t want one either. I just wanted to do something with my hands.
Needed something to do with my hands.
“Peyton.” His voice was lower but closer, and when I turned around, he was right there. His body was so perfectly muscled that he took up all my immediate personal space, and the scent of sawdust and spring air filled my senses.
He smelled like perfection.
I never wanted to smell it again.
“Stop,” he said quietly. “We have to talk about this, and you know it, or you wouldn’t have sent me that text.”
I did know it. I didn’t have to like it, but I knew it.
“We can small talk over coffee, but that’s not me, and that’s not you, so let’s cut that off right away and get right to it.” His eyes settled on mine, and I couldn’t decipher how he felt just from looking at him.
“Okay, fine,” I said, shrugging a shoulder. “Let’s go sit and talk about this.”
“Lets. In a second, though.”
“Why not right now? You just said—”
He cut me off with a kiss. One that had his hand curling around the back of my neck and shivers shooting down my spine. It was slow and gentle, his lips moving with mine as if he was committing my mouth to memory.
“What was that?” I asked when he stopped.
Elliott met my eyes and took a deep breath. “When this conversation is over, I might not get to do that again. And I wanted to make sure I could kiss you one more time.”
I swallowed. Hard. I wasn’t expecting him to say that.
Worse? I didn’t know if I wanted that to be the last time he kissed me.
This was dangerous territory right here.
“Right. Well, um. Let’s talk?” Why was I incapable of not just saying it? Why did I keep asking him things?
He nodded. “Let’s talk.”
I skirted around him and led him toward the living room. We both took a seat on my sofa, and I tucked my feet under my butt.
Silence.
I didn’t know what to say. I had so many things I wanted to, I think, but none of them seemed like they were the right thing.
Did I apologize for ignoring him? Did I acknowledge what he’d told me? Did I ask him why he’d told me?
Did I stop thinking and grow a fucking pair?