I laughed.
Liv shut the door behind her.
I put the whiskey bottle down and leaned back.
“I’m good if you are,” I said.
“What?” Liv asked.
“We don’t have to tell Nash about this, babe.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m here to fuck someone,” I said. “I found a beauty in the front row, but you’re here instead. You’re prettier than her anyway. Wait a second… did you send her to Nash? And you’re coming to me? Are we doing that now? Swapping within the band?”
“That’s exactly why I’m here, Sab,” Liv said.
She strutted toward the couch.
She moved right to me.
I slowly put my head back as she began to lean over the couch.
In reality, I needed to get Nash’s permission for this.
But…
“You really think I’m here to fuck you?” Liv whispered.
“Why else would you be here?” I asked.
“To do this…”
Liv slapped me across the face.
That woke my ass up.
“Are you fucking kidding me, Sab?”
“What?” I asked as I rubbed my cheek.
“Who the fuck do you think you are? That I would just come in here and…” She shook her head.
“Where’s the one I picked out?” I asked.
“Going home, Sab.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes,” Liv said. “You’re not fucking some random woman from the audience.”
“Says who?”
“Says me,” Liv said.
She lifted her hand again.
I curled my lip.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Then stop being an asshole. What do you think you’re going to do? Are you going to sleep with anyone with a pulse to chase away Bree?”
“Exactly.”
“That’s not going to work.”
“I had extras too,” I said.
Liv looked at the table. She shook her head. “Great. So you could end up like Mitchy. I never knew the guy but I knew what he did to all of you. And I saw what his death did to you, Sab.”
“Oh, you’re so caring,” I said. “Observant. Wow. No wonder Nash loves you.”
“Don’t be a dick to me,” she said. “I’m trying to help you.”
“I didn’t ask for help.”
“But you need it,” she said. “You fucked up, Sab. I know you know Bree more than I do or ever will, but you fucked up. And you think you did something right. In your heart, you did. In reality, you didn’t.”
“She’s gone. It’s fine.”
“That’s it?” Liv asked.
“That’s it, babe,” I said. “It’s that simple for me. I’m not all emotional like Nash. Let me ask you something… does he cry when he comes?”
Liv laughed. “You think I’m going to buy into this rock star bullshit attitude? You love her. She loves you. You messed up. You have a chance to make it right.”
“How?”
“Go to her,” Liv said. “You’re being an idiot. You left her to become famous. She left you to get that sting out of her heart. Now go fucking get her.”
The door opened and Nash looked surprised to see Liv in my room.
“Hey, Nash,” I said. “Liv is trying to fuck me.”
Nash laughed. “In your dreams, Sab.”
Nash came into the room… and so did the rest of the band.
I rolled my eyes.
How did I go from picking out a woman to sleep with to this?
“What the fuck is this shit?” Jay asked as he kicked the table.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You touch that shit and you’re out of the band,” Reed said.
I stood up. “Fuck you, Reed. I’ll do whatever the fuck I want.”
“Take it easy, Sab,” Liv said to me. “We’re trying to help you.”
“I don’t need help,” I said. “I need that blonde beauty in here, right now, on her knees, choking on my cock.”
“That’s lyrical,” Dex said. “Let’s turn that into a song.”
I looked at Dex. “We can call it What Candice Wants to Do to Sab…”
Dex jumped over the table at me.
We were tangled up for a split second before Jay and Nash peeled us apart.
I walked to the other side of the room and looked in the mirror at everyone looking at me.
“Of course I love her,” I said. “I’ve always loved her. But I knew where I was going. I wasn’t going to stay in that town and get stuck there. I knew she’d never leave either. Somewhere in my heart I thought once I was rich and famous it would work out. But money can’t change someone’s heart, wants or needs.”
“No shit,” Jay said.
“So what are you going to do?” Reed asked.
“First…” I turned around. “I’m going to apologize for what I just said to you… Dex.”
Dex nodded. “It’s all good. Candice is fucking beautiful. Who wouldn’t dream of her on her knees… right?”
“Liv,” I said.
“Don’t bother,” she said. “You never stood a chance with me. I’d rip your dick off and make you eat it.”
“She would,” Nash said.
I lowered my head. “It’s been a fucked-up ride here…”
I lifted my head and the door opened again.
In came Candice, Abby, and Wren.
“What did we miss?” Candice asked.
“Oh, nothing,” Dex said. “Sab was just fantasizing about you.”
“Me?” Candice asked.
She looked at me and I winked.
Dex moved to Candice and put his arm around her.
“This is weird,” I said. “Too many people in here. And everyone is dressed.”
“Where’s Bree?” Abby asked.
“Gone,” I said.
“You messed it up?” Wren asked.
“Maybe,” I said.
“She’s hurting,” Wren said. “I know what that’s like.”
Jay put his arm around Wren and kissed the top of her head.
“We’re all hurting,” Nash said.
I swallowed hard. “If we ever end a show like this again, I’m quitting the band.”
“There’s only one way to keep it from happening,” Reed said.
“How?” I asked.
“Do something about it.”
22
BREE
I looked through the orders and looked at my phone.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Mia came through the front door with coffees.
“Thank you,” I called out.
“It comes with a price,” she said.
“Of course it does,” I said. “What now?”
“Do you remember my great grandmother?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Do you remember when we’d sit outside and she’d tell us a storm was coming?”
“Yes.”
“She always knew. Do you remember what she used to say?”
“About it being so calm?”
“Exactly,” Mia said.
“What’s your point?” I asked.
I reached for my coffee and she took it away. “That’s you, Bree.”
“What?”
“The calm. You haven’t said a thing since you got back. You went from crying and being a mess to leaving to suddenly coming back to…”
“Back to normal,” I said. “This is my life, Mia. Right here. It’s where I belong.”
“So you and Sab are just friends again?”
“What we’ve always been.”
“You haven’t heard from him,” she said. “And you stare at your phone like it’s going to stand up and walk away.”
“Observant?”
“Always,” Mia said.
I let out a long sigh. “Okay. Sab went behind my back and found my birth parents. They’re alive. I didn’t tell
him to do that. Because… I made the decision I don’t want to know them. I don’t want to know about them. I don’t want to meet them. I have no desire. My mother raised me. And she died. It was tragic. But I’m not going to then suddenly find my birth parents and hope for something else.”
“Shit,” Mia said.
“On top of that, what was I going to do? Just stay with him? In Los Angeles? To do what? I have a life here. I have a job here. I have to face everything here. It’s been hard this past week, Mia. Finally facing my mother’s death. Going through the motions of everyone wanting to talk about her.”
“And you’re doing it alone,” she said. “What about Sab?”
“Exactly. What about him? He’s where he belongs.”
“If you called him right now, he’d show up.”
“I know.”
“So…”
“So what?” I asked. I grabbed the coffee from her. “I am not going to mess up his life. I am not going to carry that burden on me. Just like he’s not going to carry the burden of taking care of me if I were to move to Los Angeles.”
“Is that something you want to do?” Mia asked.
“No.”
“Have you even considered it?”
“No.”
“So you’re being stubborn.”
“I’m right where I belong,” I said. I turned the clipboard around. “We’re swamped with orders.”
Mia put her hand over the paper on the clipboard. “I’ll make you a deal.”
“What?” I asked.
“We work all day,” she said. “I don’t say a word about you and Sab.”
“Okay. What’s the catch?”
“Tonight,” she said. “I’m coming over and you’re telling me everything. And I mean… everything.”
I felt myself blushing.
I couldn’t help myself either.
That only made Mia smile because she knew there was no way in hell I went to Los Angeles and didn’t end up in bed with Sab.
She wasn’t wrong with that assumption either.
No man would ever come close to Sab…
“Fine,” I said. “Just shut up and work.”
Mia took the clipboard and walked away happy.
I looked at my phone again.
Maybe it was all over…
And maybe that was a good thing.
I pressed my middle fingers to the corners of my eyes because I didn’t want to sit there and cry. Of course Mia had to bring wine over. Her affinity for wine never made much sense, and since I wasn’t a wine drinker…
“You’re feeling it, Bree,” Mia said to me.
I looked up at her. “You’re sitting on the couch.”
“You’re sitting on the floor.”
“What are we doing?”
“You’re talking.”
“I’m confused.”
“I know you are,” she said. She slid off the couch to join me on the floor. “It’s okay to be confused right now, Bree. Sometimes you try to go forward so fast. It’s okay to stop and be hurt or sad or mad. You know, you can be stubborn.”
“Hey, I am mad,” I said. “This is me being mad. I’m hurt too. I’m everything you just said. This is me showing it. He fucked up. Right? You know that, right?”
Mia nodded, but I didn’t believe her. “There’s nothing I can say to what’s happening, Bree. I’m here. I’m your best friend. Not him. He was never your best friend. Or a friend at all.”
I inched away from Mia. I turned to face her. “Then what was he?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“He was the love of your life. You were the same for him. You two have been in love all these years. You both protected each other. He protected you from whatever he thought was going to hurt you and you protected him from giving up his dream. You can’t see that?”
I swallowed hard. “And that makes sense to you?”
“And it doesn’t to you?” Mia hit back hard.
I looked away.
“You’ve never had a serious relationship, Bree,” Mia said.
“You know what? I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I want to talk about the shop. The business. Growth. I want to talk about what’s going to happen in life. No more of the past, Mia.”
“I agree,” she said.
I looked at her again. “You’re a really good friend, Mia. You just let me ramble and change the subject and not fight me.”
“I’m the best,” she said. “And because I’m the best, you should listen to me. That’s all I’m going to say. Now, let’s talk business.”
“Gina is never going to give up that shop,” I said.
“No.”
“That kind of screws us over.”
“A little.”
“You have a husband, Mia. A second income. I don’t. I don’t want to be limited.”
“So don’t be,” she said. “What’s your mind thinking right now?”
I slowly smiled. “That we open our own shop.”
“Wow,” Mia said with a sigh. “And compete with my mother? That’ll make Thanksgiving interesting.”
“No, I didn’t mean it like that,” I said. “I meant… expanding.”
“Oh, you meant opening another location?”
“Yes,” I said. “But that location is ours. Like, we work it out where Gina gets something from it, but it’s ours. We share the profits this time.”
“She’ll worry about the main store.”
“Then we put it all together and split it three ways,” I said. “Not that we would need incentive though. I would never want anything to happen to the store here in town. That place is…”
“I know,” Mia said. “I think we should get some sleep. I change my mind. I don’t want to talk about business. And you don’t want to talk about rock stars.”
I shook my head. “He’s not a rock star to me. He’s Sebastian.”
“But the guy you slept with…”
“That was Sab.”
“It’s the same guy,” Mia said. “Whether you like it or not. You’ve built it up as two different guys to justify sleeping with him. I get why. But you should own it.”
“And what he-”
“I’m just going to say it,” Mia said. “Then you can hate me a little. So what? He made a gesture to you to prove to you he cares. Did he miss the target? I don’t know. Did he? How long would it have taken you to find your birth parents? And the entire time you’d be questioning everything. Do you think maybe for one second that Sab knows more about you than you think? And he did that to keep you from driving yourself crazy? Now I get it. You didn’t want the address. You didn’t want that nagging voice in your head on what to do. But… it’s your decision. I can’t imagine what you’re processing. Your mother died and told you that you were adopted. Sab didn’t do that.”
Mia stood up and blew me a kiss.
She really was a good friend.
I didn’t like her all that much in the moment, but that was okay.
She was going to sleep in my bed.
Mia refused to sleep on the couch so we always shared my bed.
Tonight, I wasn’t going to do that.
She could have the bed.
I pulled myself to the couch and pulled the blanket on the back of the couch on top of me.
I reached for my phone as though there was going to magically be some texts or something waiting.
There wasn’t.
I looked at the dining room table.
All the flowers were gone.
They were dead, thrown in the trash, and gone.
Everything had just moved forward.
I slowly shut my eyes.
I begged my mind not to dream of Sab. Or Sebastian.
I knew that was impossible.
I look at myself in the mirror.
Am I pretty enough? For him?
I notice that my eyebrows are uneven.
There are some girls that actually get their ey
ebrows taken care of.
Not me.
I’ve never asked my mother about it. I didn’t want her to question me as to why.
My eyelashes are too short too.
Someone told me that boys look at girls’ eyelashes.
Not sure if that’s true.
And then my shirt.
I don’t want to wear slutty clothes, but it would be nice to…
I look down.
I wish my chest was bigger and my stomach flatter.
Duh - who doesn’t?
But the only thing that matters is…
“Am I pretty enough?”
“Of course you are.”
I gasp and turn to see my mother standing in the bathroom doorway.
“Mom.”
“Bree.”
“What are you doing?”
“Who’s the lucky boy that’s driving your heart crazy?”
I swallow hard. “Nobody.”
“Can you tell me three things you like about yourself?”
“No.”
“I can. I love your eyes. They’re always bright. I love your smile. It makes me smile. And I love your ears.”
“My ears?”
“Yeah. They’re perfect. They’re cute.”
“I don’t think boys are going to care about my ears.”
“Maybe not. Is this about… Sebastian?”
“What? No! He’s my friend, Mom. Are you serious? That would be weird. So weird.”
She nods. “Okay. Just asking.”
“Did you like someone that you shouldn’t?”
“Well, if you like someone… why shouldn’t you?”
After a few silent seconds, my mother laughs.
She walks to me and hugs me.
“I love you, Bree,” she whispers. “You’re beautiful. I know it’s hard not to compare yourself to others. And I know it’s easy to try and find things wrong with you. But you’re beautiful. And perfect. Trust me. You don’t ever have to change.”
She kisses the top of my head and walks out of the bathroom.
I look at myself in the mirror again.
She might be right.
Or I just might be wrong.
Me? Sebastian?
It can’t happen.
I need to shove that away.
I love him. I can’t help that I love him.
But I can hide that.
But if he ever tells me he likes me…
I groaned in my sleep, knowing where the dream was going to go.
It was the dream where Sab showed up to tell me he loved me.
A FILTHY Friend (Filthy Line Book 5) Page 19