Shae Gadson.
The girl I’ve known since I was ten. The one who was abused and abandoned by her junkie mother. Who suffers from dyslexia and bipolar disorder because of her pregnant junkie mother. Who was sexually abused by an older neighbor when she was eleven. The one I’ve shielded from countless bullying and have stood up for when no one else would. The one who might be a little temperamental and unreliable at times, but the one who I know will always have my back when it counts.
Because I’ve always had hers.
As I carefully slip into the tight red dress, I think back to the night West and I fought about her—and subsequently broke up.
I sigh as the call ends with a resounding click in my ear.
Shae just hung up on me and not for the first time. Hell, I can’t even count how many times she’s done it over the course of our friendship. But this time, I know it was simply due to her prickly pride. She’s been having some problems getting the hang of the computer software at her job, so I encouraged her to take a computer education course.
She took that the wrong way.
She’d thought I was calling her stupid, which is a deep bone of contention for her. She never appreciates the insinuation that she can’t comprehend something, can’t figure something out by herself, and she’s wildly defensive about it. I know it all stems back to the way other kids in school used to tease her when she had problems reading out loud and even writing, to a degree. They used to taunt and laugh, saying she needed to be moved to the “special ed” class.
To this day, it still breaks my heart when I remember how she used to cry on my shoulder about it.
“I’m not dumb, Harper,” she used to say. “I swear I’m not. It’s just that every time I look at the words on the page, they get all jumbled and out of order. I don’t know why.”
She hadn’t been diagnosed with dyslexia at that time. But even after she was, it hadn’t exactly made things easier for her. There are tons of people who don’t fully understand what the learning disorder is and how significantly it impacts those who have it.
So, when she started yelling caustic things at me over the phone just now, I let it roll off my back like I always do. That instinctual, knee-jerk reaction of Shae’s is a learned one, acquired after years and years of being made fun of, and I can’t blame her for it.
She’ll get over it and apologize tomorrow. Or two days from now. Or next week.
She always does…eventually.
“Why do you put up with that?” West asks from the couch in his apartment.
From my seat at the kitchen table, my head jerks in his direction, his voice breaking me out of years’ worth of Shae memories.
“With what?”
The Braves game blasts from the TV in front of him, but he’s oddly not paying attention to it. Instead, he’s leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, head lowered, eyes downcast.
“With her bullshit,” he hisses. “You’ve done more for her than anyone should ever expect. Why do you let her treat you that way?”
My head rears back at his vehement tone.
In the three weeks that I’ve known him, I haven’t seen even a glint of anger in those caramel eyes. Except for the one time we met everyone at The Suckling Pig, a colonial-themed bar where Sloane works, and that guy hit on me pretty hard. West had sure been ready to thrown down then.
But that anger has never been directed at me.
“She can’t help it,” I say, defending her as always. Another knee-jerk reaction. “She can’t control her emotions the way we can, West.” Because dyslexia isn’t Shae’s only issue. Bipolar disorder came out when we were teenagers, and it came strong. “When her anger explodes to the surface like that, she’ll spew it at anyone in her path. I just happen to usually be the one in the line of fire.”
His responding scowl once again takes me aback. His expression is so…infuriated. And maybe a little disgusted. Is that targeted at me, too?
Because that hurts. A hell of a lot.
“There’s a difference between having a disorder and just being a bitch,” he snaps. “Controlling one’s emotions has nothing to do with manipulation. And Shae’s a fucking pro at playing you.”
Okay, now, he’s going too far.
“You don’t even know her. You’ve barely spoken to her.”
“I don’t need to speak to her to know what she’s all about. I hear the way she speaks to you, and that’s enough for me. After seeing the way she treats you, I don’t want to get to know her.”
I take several deep breaths, calling on the same patience reserves I have stored up for those tense encounters with Shae. “I understand it’s difficult in the beginning with her. It takes time to figure out how to deal with her moods. But she’s important to me, West.”
His gaze slams into mine from across the room, pinning me in place. “She’s using you, Harper, and you’re letting her. Just like you let your mother.”
I slap my hands onto the table and explode to my feet. “Whoa, whoa. Do not go there. You know things between me and my mother are complicated, and you have no right to throw it in my face.”
His mouth forms into a thin line. “Fine. I apologize for bringing that up. But I’m not sorry for what I said about Shae. She’s not a good person. I don’t think you should be friends with her.”
My fingers curl into my palms, my dormant temper trickling upward. “You don’t get to tell me who I should and should not be friends with. We haven’t known each other that long.”
His laughter comes out flat as he scrubs his hand down his face. “Oh, so we have to cross a certain time threshold in our relationship before honesty can come out? No matter how much intimacy we’ve already shared or the things we’ve said to each other?”
Emotion threatens to put me in a chokehold. As insane as it sounds, considering the infancy of our relationship, we’re on the cusp of the big “L.” I can sense it in him, just like I know he can feel it pulsating inside me.
No one else has ever understood the part of my life that involves Shae. And up until this moment, I thought West did.
Shae needs me.
I’m her mother, her sister, her friend, her mentor, her conscience, her backbone, her rock, all rolled into one. And I’m okay with that because she hasn’t had a single other person in her life she can count on to do any of those jobs. It’s not her fault that her mother drank and did drugs when Shae was in the womb. It’s not her fault she has a learning disability and a chemical imbalance. It’s not her fault she was sent to live with her elderly, ailing grandmother as a child. Even though my mother and I have never seen eye-to-eye, at least I’ve been fortunate enough to have two parents present for my entire life. They’ve taken care of me, provided for me, and ultimately, protected me. At least physically, though maybe not always emotionally.
Shae has had no one.
No one but me.
And if I have to take a little abuse every now and then whenever she has one of her mood swings in order to remind her that she’s loved, then so be it. I refuse to give up on her when everyone else in her life has.
I need West to understand that.
I’ve heard too much crap about our friendship from everyone else in my life. I don’t need to hear it from him, too.
“Where is all this coming from?” I demand. “You’ve been weird ever since her birthday party the other night. Did something happen I don’t know about?”
His nostrils flare, but he gives no other outward reaction that would concern me. “Nothing happened other than me getting a closer look at her character. Her personality. And I just don’t see why you’d want to be friends with someone like that.”
There’s a sharp pain in my chest, his judgment daggering me like a stake through the heart.
“You don’t understand our friendship,” I whisper, fighting for the words to come out even instead of broken. “You don’t understand where she came from. And it honestly hurts that you’re not even trying to understand
. You’re not giving her a chance.”
“Oh, I gave her a chance, Harper. I gave her the benefit of the doubt because I know she’s important to you. But I’m not going to sit idly by and act like I don’t have a problem with the way she verbally attacks you almost every time you two speak, and the way you meekly sit there and take blow after blow. Maybe everyone else in your life is too afraid to say this to your face, but I’m not. You need to stand up for yourself and put her in her place.”
The word meek hits me particularly hard. Mainly because it’s an adjective I’ve always attributed to myself and have resented it. It comes up every time I self-reflect and frankly, I don’t know how to eliminate it from my psyche.
“You want me to stand up for myself?” I practically yell. No risk of my words coming out broken now. “Fine. Stop pushing me, West. I have enough people in my life trying to tell me what to do, and I don’t need the guy I’m sleeping with to follow suit.”
His eyes widen, then narrow to slits. When he slowly rises to his feet, danger radiates from every muscle in his body. “The guy you’re sleeping with? Is that really what you just said, Harper?” His chest deflates, like his lungs all of a sudden give out on him. “Does that mean I should start referring to you as ‘the chick I’m fucking’?”
I regret those last words of mine more than anything else. They weren’t true. They were just spoken in the heat of the moment as a million other emotions pelted me from all directions.
But the bottom line is, I thought West understood me.
I thought he got it. He was supposed to get it.
After those comments, we said a lot of other nasty, ugly things to each other. Thinking about how sharp things turned in a matter of seconds still makes me queasy. Even more nauseating is how happy I mistakenly thought I’d been before that argument. How convinced I’d been that West was the real deal—that he was it for me. It makes my stomach churn to realize how misguided I’d been, all because I’d let attraction and lust get the better of me.
I went with my instincts instead of rationale for the first time in my life when I signed that lease, and look where it got me. I took the risk instead of erring with caution, and I crashed and burned into a deadly ravine. I’m sick over the fact that I’ll forever question my instincts from here on out. This entire experience has soured me on spontaneity and impulsivity until probably the end of time.
We cut the cord on our relationship shortly after that fight, prompting West to storm out of his own apartment just minutes before I did the same. By the next day, I’d gone from Harper to princess. I didn’t for a second make the mistake of assuming the name came from a place of affection. It was a barb. A weapon used to needle, maybe even maim.
That same day, I started on a path to ultimately carve West out of my heart. If he couldn’t get onboard with my oldest friend, despite the unorthodox friendship we may or may not have, then he’s clearly not the right guy for me.
The only problem is, I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of erasing him from my heart if I can’t erase him from my mind.
And that will never happen, short of a lobotomy, as long as we’re living under the same roof.
I know how Gretchen, Sloane, and Quinn feel about Shae, too. There’s all kinds of animosity between them and Shae and uncomfortable tension anytime they’re all in the same room together. Especially Quinn, since she’s been around me almost as long as Shae has. Our parents were married during our junior high and high school years, so Quinn has seen far more than the other two have.
Because of their feelings about her, I’d honestly been afraid they’d take West’s side when I told them about that night.
But like always, they had my back.
Why couldn’t West have mimicked them and kept his opinions about Shae to himself?
Because you’re not meant for each other.
Snapping myself out of my depressing reverie, I finish pulling up the zipper on the strapless red gown and assess myself in the mirror.
“Someone book a church,” I breathe. “Because I’ve fallen in love.”
“You getting a little friendly with yourself in there, Barbie?” Gretchen snickers.
Okay, red might just be my long-lost lover. Why have I never tried it before? The mermaid-style cut of the dress hugs my curves, accentuating my small waist and making my narrow hips look like they’ve got more oomph to them than they actually do. My favorite feature is the slit up the middle. It pulls the material taut across my ass and draws the eye to everything along the center of my body, making me appear taller and slimmer.
Sloane was right. My platinum blond hair really does pop against the red. Smear on some bright red matte lipstick and top lid eyeliner, and I’ll transform into a longer-haired Marilyn Monroe. Although my mother would prefer Grace Kelly. She’d hate this dress on sight because it’s not modest enough, not respectable enough. Not there’s anything wrong with Grace. She’s the epitome of a timeless classic.
But I’m always Grace.
I never get to be Marilyn. Tempting. Lusty.
Now, those are adjectives I’ve never used to describe myself.
And you motherfreaking love it.
Slut-sheeba needs to crawl back into her dank hole. She has no place here.
I walk out of the fitting room to once again face my friends’ scrutiny.
Quinn takes one look at me and chokes on her champagne. “Hot damn.”
“Va-va-voom.” This from Sloane.
I bite my lower lip, excitement coursing through my veins. “You think it’ll work?”
“Well, if your goal is to make an entire room full of men volunteer to impregnate you, then yes. I think it’ll be a phenomenal success.”
The second Gretchen says that, I know I haven’t made a bit of progress in trying to de-neuralyze West from my mind, Men in Black style. Because the first and only thought echoing in my mind in that moment is would he leave it in one piece or rip it to shreds when he goes to tear it off me?
“Go try on another wedding dress,” I blurt out to Gretchen.
“Why?”
“Because we’re going to need more champagne. Lots more.”
The sales associate chooses that moment to slip past the thick curtain to the fitting rooms. “How are we doing, ladies?” she asks cheerily.
Gretchen makes a show of pushing her boobs up as far as they will go in the confines of the dress’s bodice. “Fabulous, doll. But do you have anything a little less virginal? Everyone in that church, including my ninety-year-old grandmother and the priest, will know I’m trying to pull one over on them. Know what I mean?”
The poor woman’s face turns as red as my new dress.
The next day is one of those days.
The kind that makes it feel like life is one giant trash compactor that’s slowly crushing your insides into tiny little bits.
Though to be fair, it feels like that every day with my job at the Foundation. Aside from their own self-congratulatory annual gala, the Charleston Society Foundation is responsible for organizing all major social events in the city, including the annual debutante ball, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, who’s who of the Lowcountry-type dinners, and various charity events.
Aside from the charity events, we’re basically in charge of a bunch of useless shit.
But working there is “what St. Clair women do,” as my mother would say.
In a sense, being an underling for the Foundation is an initiation into the innermost circle of my mother’s cadre of friends and other “important people.” It comes with the expectation of eventually moving on to work in a “respectable” sector of the community once I’ve made the right social connections. Violet worked at the Foundation years ago and is now the manager at one of the most prestigious country clubs in the area.
So, when my time came—pretty much the same day my college diploma was slapped in my hand—my job at the Foundation was already waiting for me. And since I hadn’t been able to make a career out of what
I really want to do with my life at the time, I caved to my mother’s demands. But I told myself that it’s just temporary. A means to an end.
Because that Foundation is straight-up sucking the life force out of me. Just like the dementors in Harry Potter. And after today, my life force has shriveled up like a dehydrated carrot.
I had to listen to some chignon-wearing, snotty-nosed socialite complain about how horrible the tablecloths looked at her fundraiser for underprivileged youths last night. Miss, do you even know there’s a difference between off-white and eggshell?
It took every ounce of my self-control to not spit back at her bitch, do you even know a single one of those underprivileged youths’ names?
But because I’m a good little St. Clair girl, I swallowed the censure and fantasized about West instead.
Wait, no.
I fantasized about murdering West.
Yeah, that’s what happened.
I’m momentarily confused by the loud male voices I hear coming from inside my house once I step onto the front porch. I open the door to see chips and salsa littering the living room coffee table and four rowdy guys decked out in their Atlanta Braves attire with beers in their hands.
My eyes drift shut with dread.
Goddammit.
I completely forgot about the game.
As soon as West’s eyes find mine, his shoulders tense. That reaction bothers me, though I don’t have the energy to examine why.
It also bothers me that he has the nerve to look so damn delectable in his fitted Braves T-shirt, low-sitting athletic shorts, and baseball cap on backwards, a superstitious habit I know he only has whenever his beloved team is losing.
“Harper.”
I barely contain my flinch. I’d much rather hear his snide princess than that hollow, emotionless delivery of my name. Which absolutely doesn’t make a lick of sense.
“West.”
“Hey, Harper,” Seth tosses out without looking away from the TV.
He’s the only one I met before West and I broke up. But since I’ve far exceeded my politeness quota for the day, I don’t make the effort for introductions with the other two guys, whose gazes noticeably linger on me as I bypass them on my way to the kitchen.
The Six Month Lease (Southern Hearts Club Book 2) Page 4