Undone

by Kelly Rimmer

  “Clara is a dog,” Jake suddenly says.

  My jaw drops.

  “Did you seriously just call your girlfriend a dog?”

  “Jessica. Clara is a dog. She’s—” He groans and reaches for his phone. “She’s a dog. An actual dog. That’s her species, not an insult. Now can you put some clothes on and stop acting like a crazy jealous person so I can apologize for being an asshole back there?”

  “What kind of a name is Clara for a dog?” I scowl.

  “The kind of name a rescue shelter gives a pet, actually,” he snaps as he spins the screen of his phone around so I can see it.

  So, two things here:

  First, Clara-the-dog has clearly had a tough life—it looks a little like she’s recently emerged from some kind of blender. Even so, she’s fluffy and tiny, and in the photo, Jake is holding her high in his huge, strong arms and they are the most adorably mismatched pair I’ve ever seen. I’m so relieved I could cry all over again, and now I kind of want to punch myself in the face for that too. I absolutely hate jealousy—it’s an emotion that never leads to anything good. Besides, I have no right to be jealous when it comes to Jake Winton.

  Two: Jake just accused me of being jealous and crazy. The nerve. That kind of does make me crazy. I cross my arms under my boobs—pushing them higher instead of blocking his view from them—and I raise an eyebrow.

  “Did you just call me crazy?”

  “I didn’t call you crazy, but your behavior most definitely qualifies,” Jake says, and his gaze briefly drops down over my body before he closes his eyes and grinds out, “For fuck’s sake, Jess. Let me inside, put a robe on and let’s talk.”

  I want to slam the door shut and go hide under my duvet. I want to pretend he’s not here and I don’t have to face him. I want to pretend I don’t wish things could have been different. I want to pretend I don’t relive those months with him when I’m lonely or sad, or that the hours we spent in bed together haven’t secured VIP status in my spank bank listings. I want to pretend that throwing Jake Winton away isn’t one of the only regrets I ever let myself think about.

  But Jake opens his eyes and he’s now staring at me, an apology in his gaze, and I feel myself weakening. I sigh and step out of the doorway, then without waiting to see if he comes inside, I head for my bedroom.

  “Make yourself at home,” I mutter. “I’ll just change.” Again.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jake

  WHILE JESS IS in her bedroom, I look around her apartment. She still has a particularly unique sense of style. Most of the walls are white, but there’s a feature wall behind her TV that’s a vibrant, fire-engine red. It’s so bright it almost hurts my eyes. Over the glass dining table, she’s hung a huge crystal chandelier, and all of her appliances are a glossy red to match the feature wall.

  She has most of the same furniture I remember, but she has a new, brightly colored wing chair and a white leather sofa. Between them, a bright red rug sits over whitewashed floorboards.

  The white sofa is incredibly low—it looks like it’s been designed for preschoolers. Given it’s in Jess’s apartment, I assume it’s insanely expensive and designed for style over comfort. I feel like I’m falling to the ground as I try to sit, and then once I’m down, my knees are almost as high as my head is.

  This is fucking ridiculous. But I have a feeling the wing chair is Jess’s throne, and if I take it, she’ll feel attacked. So I settle into the stupid miniature sofa and try to do some rapid-fire strategizing. I have two options here. I can prance around the issue and try to gent ly ease my way into a conversation with her, treating her like she’s fragile, which she’ll hate, and which will probably make her angry.

  Or I can do what she’d do if she had initiated this chat: address it head-on. Like a bull charging at a red flag. Or, in this case, like a bull charging at a red flag in a china shop that’s balancing precariously on some kind of cliff, because our entire history is littered with fragile things.

  “I’m sorry I upset you,” I say as soon as Jess reenters the room. She’s pulled a floral satin nightgown on over that skimpy minidress, and she’s put on an air of determined calm. She curls up on the wing chair, then tilts her head and raises her eyebrows at me.

  Jess looks like a vision, like a queen surveying her kingdom. She looks serene and magnificent and perfect, right up until she opens her mouth and spits out, “You did not ‘upset’ me.”

  Oh my God. This woman.

  “Sorry I made you cry, then.”

  She stiffens, then her carefully neutral expression shifts into a glare as if I’ve insulted her.

  “I didn’t cry.”

  “It doesn’t even matter,” I groan, already exasperated. “Whatever happened back there, I’m here to tell you I’m sorry.”

  “You already said that. In the hallway. So, are we done?”

  I’m pretty laid-back and it takes a lot to piss me off. Jess has always had a way of hitting that threshold miles faster than anyone else.

  “Christ, Jessica. What do you want from me?”

  “Nothing. I don’t want anything from you. That’s the whole point.”

  She is the most infuriating woman I’ve ever met. I groan and tilt my head back to stare at the ceiling as I expel a frustrated breath.

  “We need to clear the air,” I say. “We can’t make tomorrow about us.”

  I drag my gaze back to her, and after a particularly fraught moment where we just glare at one another in silence, Jess sighs heavily and shakes her head. I know she’s let down her guard the minute her gaze softens.

  “I’m sorry too. I don’t even know what happened tonight.”

  “There’s a lot of tension between us these days, it seems.”

  “There was always tension between us. This wasn’t the usual tension.” She clears her throat, then raises her chin stubbornly. “I really didn’t think there’d be any hard feelings between us.”

  I’m trying not to gape at her, but I’m failing miserably.

  “Are . . . But . . . I mean . . . You’re kidding, right?”

  Her gaze narrows.

  “We are fundamentally incompatible. We agreed we were fundamentally incompatible and so we ended it.”

  I was madly in love for the first time in my life. When Jess’s inheritance from her grandmother came due, she went hunting for an apartment and insisted I come with her. I really thought that was some kind of hint that she was thinking about us making it official and moving in together eventually. A few days later, I walked past a jeweler and my gaze snagged on an emerald ring in the window . . . a flawless, perfectly round stone, set alongside two diamonds in a rose gold setting. It screamed Jess to me, and I already knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, so I walked in and bought it then and there.

  Then I went to the West Coast for a week for work, and when I came home, she said she wanted to talk. Her expression was cold and hard, and she spoke so formally, I felt like I was at a job interview that was going horribly wrong.

  I’m sorry, Jake. This has just gotten out of hand. We want different things from life.

  We talked for a while, but it was pretty obvious that we weren’t going to find common ground. Jess had no way of knowing I was about to propose, but she was right to assume that I did want a commitment from her and, I suppose, at least honest enough to be up-front about the fact that she did not want that.

  I’ve never been angry that she broke up with me. She wants what she wants, and I respect her for knowing her own mind. No, I was and am angry at the way that she discarded me as if I was nothing to her, and if I’m really honest, I’m pretty pissed off that she insisted we hide our relationship. When we first started seeing one another, she said she was just trying to keep her business and personal lives separate. Maybe I wasn’t entirely convinced, given she’s close friends and business partners with both Paul and Marcus, but I did respect that romantic relationships can be more complicated than friendships.

  M
ostly I went along with it because I had no idea how things between us were going to play out. Besides, I thought that once we fell into a rhythm together, we’d just come clean to our friends.

  That’s not how it played out at all.

  I don’t know what the expression on my face is, but I’m guessing it’s pretty dark, because Jess looks flustered for the second time tonight. Maybe for the second time in all of the years I’ve known her.

  “We fell in love so hard it rocked my entire world, Jessica,” I grind out. “It wasn’t a simple case of us just not seeing one another anymore for me. And you won’t convince me it was that simple for you either.”

  “We weren’t ‘in love,’” she gasps, focusing on entirely the wrong part of my announcement. I blink at her.

  “What were we, then?”

  “Lust, Jake. It was lust,” she says pointedly, but then she avoids my gaze as she tightens the tie on her robe.

  “Lust?” I repeat, gaping at her.

  “I assume that even Saint Fucking Jake is familiar with the concept?” Jess says, a little bitterly. I frown, then tilt my head at her.

  “That’s the story you tell yourself even after all of this time, isn’t it? You convinced yourself what we had was just physical, so you didn’t have to feel guilty about how cruel you were.”

  “I don’t want to do this,” she blurts. “I don’t want to have a postmortem. I don’t want to dig up the past. Can’t we just go back to the way it was for the next few days?”

  “The way it was?” I repeat incredulously.

  “When we were friends, Jake. We had a lot of good years when we were just friends.”

  “Jessica. You and I were never just friends.”

  She raises her chin stubbornly.

  “You’re angry because of the breakup. Even after all of this time. I really thought you respected my decision. Frankly, your attitude reeks of ‘entitled male’ right now.”

  Oh, she did not go there.

  “You treated me like shit,” I say flatly.

  “I did not!”

  “You used me like a dirty little secret. You had no regard whatsoever for my feelings at any point during our relationship or after it, when you just cut me out of your life as if I was nothing to you. You didn’t even invite me to your housewarming party, for fuck’s sake. Do you know how hard that was to explain to everyone else?”

  “I thought it would be better—”

  “You thought it would be easier,” I correct her. She’s staring at me, lips pursed and nostrils flared, and my fragile hold on my frustration slips. When I speak again, my voice is low and harsh.

  “Maybe your Tinder dates don’t care if you use them like a piece of meat, but I should have been more than a hookup—we’d known each other for more than a decade! I deserved better. For fuck’s sake, the whole reason I looked like an asshole again tonight is that you insisted we keep our relationship from our closest friends. Am I bitter? You bet your ass I am, but not because you ended things. No, I’m angry with myself because I let you use and discard me. And the worst thing is, I’d watched you do it to other guys for years, but I was still stupid enough to think I was different.” I shift to lean forward and look right into her eyes. “I figured out why you didn’t want anyone to know about us, by the way. You knew all along where we were headed. You knew you’d end things with me, and you knew how I felt about you so you knew it wouldn’t be pretty. That’s why you didn’t want anyone to know we were even dating, so you could use me and discard me without facing their disappointment in you.”

  The words burst out of my mouth, and I’m not sure which one of us is more shocked by them. She’s staring at me with her mouth open and her eyes wide. I groan and run my hand through my hair, then unfold myself from her stupid fucking fun-sized sofa and stand.

  “This is stupid.”

  “Jake,” she says, and I’m already turning for the door, but the softness in her voice gives me pause. I glance back at her, and she bites her lip, then says very quietly, “You’re wrong. It was never my intention to hurt you.”

  “Well,” I say flatly, “you did anyway.”

  She follows me, but I pause in the hallway and turn back to her. All of a sudden, her beauty hits me hard in the gut—it’s like I’m seeing her again for the very first time. The big blue eyes framed by those eyelashes that I know are really light beneath the mascara. The skin of her face, so pale it’s almost translucent, dotted with freckles beneath her makeup. Sometimes she dyes her hair an artificially bright fire-engine red. Sometimes she colors it almost burgundy. Sometimes, like now, it’s her natural shade—a red that’s rich with copper tones and gold.

  I have tried to move on these last two years. I’ve dated a little, including a few months with Vanessa, a woman I met on a hike. I ended that because as much as I want to settle down and find a partner, I couldn’t give Vanessa my heart, and I knew she both wanted and deserved it.

  After all, wasn’t that the same problem as me and Jess, just in reverse?

  Staring down at Jess in this hallway, I’m painfully aware that the reason I couldn’t give Vanessa my heart is that Jess still holds it. I’m furious with her, I don’t particularly like her—but I want her, and I can see the echoes of desire in her eyes even as she stares up at me less than sixty fucking seconds after an argument.

  She moistens her lips and I’m reminded that beneath that flimsy gown, she’s wearing a dress so tiny that she could leave it on while we made love. I’d lift her up onto her kitchen countertop, push the dress up to her thighs, slide the panties to the side and—

  “Jake,” she whispers throatily.

  “Yes?” I whisper back. The air around us is thick and we’re both breathing heavily, the space between us shrinking by the second.

  “You should go,” Jess whispers, and the spell breaks.

  Because she’s right. I need to go, before she shatters me all over again.

  I nod curtly and walk away as fast as my legs will carry me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jess

  I’VE BEEN IN New York for seventeen years, and for the first few years, I felt like a grain of rice on a beach. That analogy sounds like something Mitch would say and I’d definitely give him shit about it if he did, but I came here straight from small-town Georgia. The size of the city was terrifying—not to mention the fact that I didn’t feel like I fit here. Not at first.

  In fact, the city began to feel like home only after a few years, once I’d built a family beyond my grandmother. First came Paul and Marcus, and Abby too, because she and Marcus were a package deal long before they were a couple. Then Jake popped up in my life because he and Paul were always hanging out and Paul and I were living and working together as we tried to get our company off the ground.

  And not long after that, I met Mitchell.

  We met in a ticket line, of all places. Abby’s mom was in town for a last-minute visit and she desperately wanted to see a particular smash-hit musical. It was sold out months in advance, but luckily for Abby’s mom, my grandma Chloe was the kind of woman who had a contact in every industry. Chloe made a call for me, and I was waiting in the ticket line to see the friend of her friend who was going to hook me up with tickets.

  But as I waited, I chatted with the guy in front of me. He was waiting to enter the ticket lottery—a long shot, but his mom was also in town and she was desperate to see it, so he figured he’d give it a try.

  Obviously, I offered to get him tickets too. I mean—why wouldn’t I? Mitch was cute and flirty, and once we realized that even Grandma Chloe’s friend of a friend could manage tickets only for the following night, we decided to leave Abby and the moms to fend for themselves so we could go out for dinner and drinks alone.

  It was a fantastic dinner. Mitch and I drank too much and laughed hysterically the whole time, and I got the real sense that I was in the presence of someone exactly like me. He invited me back to his crappy apartment, and I said yes without even a second
thought. That’s where the wheels fell off. Because it turned out that Mitchell was exactly like me, and not even I am narcissistic enough to want to fuck myself. We gave it a real shot—but after just a few minutes of an exceedingly awkward attempt at kissing, I sprinted for the door.

  I’d never have seen Mitchell Cole again, except that the very next night we had theater tickets together, and when his dear, sweet mother heard how we got the tickets, she insisted on sitting next to me. During the intermission, she let slip why she wanted to see that particular show.

  “What do you think of the female lead?” she asked me.

  “She’s amazing,” I said.

  “See, Mitchell? Even Jess thinks she’s amazing,” his mother said pointedly, then she turned to me and explained, “They used to date. He broke her heart. I may never forgive him.”

  Mitch looked so mortified that I started to feel a little sorry for him. And by the end of the night, when Mrs. Cole insisted Abby and Mrs. Herbert and I join them for a late dinner, I felt very sorry for him. Mrs. Cole is a lovely lady. She’s also a dreadful nag, and if I had to hear one more time about the adorable grandchildren Mitchell had robbed her of, I was going to scream. That’s why, somewhere between the appetizers and the main, I switched places with Abby and leaned into Mitch.

  “Will she shut up about this if we pretend we’re dating?”

  He gave me a confused look.

  “Probably.”

  “Good,” I said, and I linked our hands and slammed them on the table so everyone could see. Our sad little ploy worked and after Mrs. Cole was placated, the rest of the evening was a blast. That’s when I realized Mitch and I really did have a lot of chemistry—just not the sexual kind. By the time we parted for the night, I’d scrawled my number onto a napkin.

  “I think you and I are basically the same soul walking around in two different bodies,” I told him, and at the flash of panic in his eyes, I burst out laughing. “See? That’s exactly how I’d react if a guy said that to me. Let’s be each other’s wing-person. And let’s promise one another that we will never, ever again try to have sex.”