by Emma Hart
“How much is too much time? Because I don’t want to think about it right now.”
“As much as you need, sugar.” She reached over and squeezed my hand. “And when I was done thinkin’ about it, I’d go to the people who would understand the situation the best.”
Well, that part was easy.
“Thanks, Mimi. Do you mind if I take this up to bed?”
“Not at all. I have to go make it, though.”
“I’ve got it. Really. Go back to bed. And thank you.”
Mimi rounded the table and wrapped me in yet another hug. She held onto me a little tighter and a little longer than she had at the door, and she kissed the top of my head twice before releasing me.
“Goodnight, darlin’. I’ll make you waffles in the morning.” A third kiss accompanied that, and I smiled.
“That sounds perfect. Goodnight, Mimi.”
Chapter Eleven – Elliott
There’s always a right and wrong time for truth. Even when it’s the right time, chances are, life is gonna fuck you up the ass without lube anyway.
One hour. It’d been one hour since Peyton had left, looking dazed and confused and angry. I’d been sitting here in silence the entire time, a part of me wishing I could have chased her down the street.
Why had I told her the truth? Sure, I’d fought for months to do that in school, but this wasn’t school anymore. It didn’t matter.
She could have quite easily hate-fucked me two more times, then disappeared out of my life. The likelihood of our paths ever crossing again was incredibly low, because we’d likely have plans in place to avoid each other.
Now, she knew. She knew I hadn’t been a raging asshole. That even though I’d hurt her, I hadn’t had control over those situations.
I’d never wanted to.
Fuck, I’d wanted her to fall in love with me, not want to kill me on sight.
And now? Now, she knew, and I had no time to fall in love.
Not that she would. I had baggage, more than she knew about, and our lives were polar opposites. Never mind that she had a hidden soft side that made her wash the hair of a sick three-year-old. Never mind that her smile sent a shiver down my spine every time I got a glimpse of a genuine one.
Never mind that the look in her eyes before she’d left had punched me straight in the gut.
Peyton was a tornado in a teacup. A wild, beautiful force of nature ready to forge a path for herself, no matter who or what was in her way.
I wouldn’t be the one who’d make her change her course.
I knew, sitting here, that I needed to text her. To apologize for telling her and put an end to this experiment.
Telling her the truth about high school had changed everything. She’d been right when she said that. I could already see that she’d taken blame for some of it, when none of it had been her fault.
Had she been stubborn? Ignorant? Pig-headed?
Yes. One hundred percent, there was no doubt about that.
But she hadn’t been wrong, either. We were seventeen. She’d reacted based on what she knew, and she just happened to have a fiery, angry streak that, if you were unlucky, could unleash the fires of hell on you if you pissed her off.
In that respect, I’d been lucky. Even if I now wished she’d screamed at me, if only so I’d been able to tell her the truth.
There was no way she’d ever know about my grandmother, either. I didn’t tell anyone. It wouldn’t have changed anything, and if she’d ever found out, I believe it wouldn’t have changed anything.
Not only had she been almost intolerably stubborn back then—as she was now—she’d been proud. Too proud. And one of the things I’d done to her was damaged that pride. I’d embarrassed her in front of our entire year. Her friends, her family, total strangers.
Everyone had known I’d asked her to prom. She’d been the It Girl, after all. She’d been untouchable, just because of how she handled herself.
And in one second, I’d inadvertently destroyed a part of that.
No. Her finding out the truth from anyone else wouldn’t have made a difference. She would have been too embarrassed by her own stubbornness to apologize for ignoring me.
Not that it mattered.
I’d long forgotten the end of school. I’d been busy, after all, but seeing her brought it all back.
I’d liked her. Really liked her. If I’d been asked back then, maybe I’d have said that she was The One in the way all idiot teens thought they’d found The One.
She’d been out of my life so long, and in a city like New Orleans, I never imagined she’d ever find her way back into it. Or that I’d find my way into hers.
Especially since I had Briony. She was the gamechanger in this, but she was my daughter. I already had one fight on my hands.
As deflated as I felt, as low as my stomach had dropped at the sound of the door shutting behind Peyton, I didn’t know if I had the ability to take on another.
Which was stupid, because really, there was nothing to fight for.
There was no relationship. There were barely any feelings. All there was, was the lingering cloud of the past we shared.
One that had been fraught with naïve decisions, immature actions, and unfortunate circumstances.
Certainly nothing real.
She owned a hook-up website and reveled in her freedom.
I had a daughter and was braced for the fight of my life.
Oil and water.
We were oil and water, and if she was going to go through with this experiment, it needed to be done as soon as possible, so we could return to our normal lives.
Before one of us did something really stupid.
Chapter Twelve – Peyton
Fuck adulting. Fuck feelings. Fuck the donut store that runs out of my favorite donuts.
Fuck the donut store in particular.
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.