by Shen, L. J.
“Let me in.” I scowled, noticing rain dripping from my hair and the tip of my nose. How come I didn’t even feel wet?
“Try again. This time nicer,” she singsonged, crossing her arms over her chest. Her neon-green bomber jacket matched her hair.
“Not familiar with the term,” I bit out.
“Crying shame.” She moved for the door, half closing it in my face.
“Please, may I come in?” I asked loudly. Fuck. She reopened the door.
“What are your intentions with my friend?” She pretended to consider my request, taking another bite of the Twizzler.
Well, I would like to explain myself, fuck her six ways from Sunday, then yell at her for being so goddamn impossible, then fuck her again.
“Talk,” I said, opting for the shorter, safe-for-work answer. “I just want to talk to her.”
The rain was pounding on my head. Layla was taking her sweet-ass time to make a decision. The list of people I wanted to kill was growing by the nanosecond.
“She’s hella upset with you, so you might get through this door, but not necessarily through her door.” She finally opened the door all the way. “Good luck, Satan.”
I raced up the stairs, taking them three at a time. When I got to Madison’s door, a rush of something weird washed over me. I could almost smell Daisy and the flowers and Mad’s shampoo and freshly baked goods through the crack of the door. I wanted to take a shit and a shower and a nap, then have two of her cupcakes with a side of a blowjob. I wanted her comfort, not another fucking quarrel out of the three thousand ones we had on a daily basis.
“Madison.” I pounded on the door. I dripped all over the hallway, my clothes heavy with rain. I couldn’t feel the lower half of my body either. My goddamn ass would probably need to be amputated after it froze off. “Open the door.”
“I don’t think so.”
I wondered how I’d ended up here. Not just today but in general. I’d seen this side of her door so many times, always with a half-cocked plan, forever with some explaining and convincing to do, constantly un-fucking-invited.
I begged and I stole and I bargained and I manipulated her so many times it became a full-time job to be around her. And whenever we were alone, when I finally had her to myself, I kept reminding her it wasn’t serious. That it was temporary. That I didn’t care.
Spoiler alert: I cared. A whole lot. That was a plot twist I hadn’t seen coming, and it made me stumble backward, my back pressing against Layla’s door (thank fuck she’d just headed out). I let out a frustrated growl.
Shit. I was in love with Mad.
Madison “Maddie” Goldbloom, of all the women in the universe. The girl who wore patterned, horrible clothes and had a short pixie haircut that had gone out of style in the nineties and was obsessed with pleasing people and flowers and weddings. I loved that she was sweet and kind and thoughtful but also sassy and quick witted and made her own money.
I was painfully in love with Mad, and I hadn’t even known it until it was a second too late.
“Mad.” I stumbled back to her door, plastering my forehead to it and closing my eyes. Jesus. Losing my father and the woman I loved in close succession was too much. What had I ever done to karma to deserve this lubeless ass fucking?
Never mind. There was a long list of whats.
“Please.”
“Chase,” I heard from behind the door. Her voice was soft, pleading. “There’s not much more to say. I feel humiliated. Nina has been bugging me all day at the office, and your family probably hates me, which I really don’t want to deal with, and the thing with Clemmy is straight out of a Ricki Lake episode.”
At least she hadn’t said Jerry Springer. Progress, right?
“Just open up. Please. I’ll explain; then I’ll go.”
“Not falling for that one.” I heard her smile bitterly behind the door. “That’s how you snuck your way back into my life in the first place.”
Knowing I couldn’t convince her, I turned around and slid my back across her door. Sitting. Waiting. She knew I was there. There was a pause.
“Are you sitting against my door?”
“Correct.”
“Why?”
“I want you to see something. I’ll wait.”
And I did. I waited for an hour and a goddamn half. I heard Madison going about her evening. Cooking (pasta, basil, and olive oil—the scent was too much not to notice), feeding Daisy, and watching an episode of You I hadn’t seen yet (God dammit). Then, and only then, she came back to the door.
“Okay. I’m ready to hear what you have to say, but make it quick.”
The door was still shut. I turned around, glowering at it. Fine. We were going to do it her way.
“I’m not Booger Face’s father. Here. I took a paternity test this afternoon. As soon as Julian showed me his.” I slipped the paper through the door crack. I’d known I couldn’t be Clemmy’s father. The dates didn’t add up. Not unless I’d managed to impregnate Amber from Malta, if I’d done the math correctly (and I always did the math correctly).
My eyes were fixed on the edge of the paper sitting under the door. Mad picked it up from the other side. I let out a breath, closing my eyes in relief.
“I always knew I could never be Booger Face’s dad. That’s why I kept asking Amber for a paternity test when she banged on about it. You think I’d turn my back on a kid of mine?” I growled. “Fuck, I love her like my own kid, and she isn’t even mine. In fact, she was supposedly the very goddamn product of my fiancée and brother bumping uglies behind my back.”
Silence. Ouch. Okay. In all honesty, I’d seen it coming. There was much more to my shitty behavior than supposedly not telling her I was my ex-fiancée’s baby daddy.
“Who’s her biological father?” Mad asked through the door.
“Some dudebro from Wisconsin. I went to confront Amber after I took the paternity test.” I ran a hand through my hair. “After Amber and I broke up, she got hit with the finality of it and tried calling me, ghosting Julian, trying to make amends. By then, I was traveling and didn’t pick up. She went back home to nurse her broken whatever the fuck she has in her chest. Clemmy’s dad is an old high school flame. Amber said she’ll talk to him. We’re figuring it out so that Booger Face has the best childhood.”
“What a mess.” Mad sighed.
“Yeah.”
“Poor Clemmy.”
I sighed. “Yeah.”
I loved my niece to death, but she wasn’t what I’d come here to talk about.
“Anyway”—I cleared my throat—“my family doesn’t hate you. Just putting it out there. Mom thinks I’m a first-rate asshole, and Dad is probably taking me out of his will. But they still like you. If anything, once I explained you didn’t even ask for money or anything and just did it for Dad, you became even more heroic and perfect.”
I’d call her Martyr Maddie, but the truth was lately she hadn’t been that same meek, insecure girl I’d met all those months ago at all. She stood up for herself constantly and only did what she believed in.
And unfortunately, it made her stupidly irresistible.
The quiet from the other side of the door grated on my nerves. I dragged my forehead over the wood, squeezing my eyes shut.
“I don’t want this to be over.” The admission fell from my mouth on a whisper.
I wasn’t ready to tell her everything yet. I recognized it seemed like a highly convenient time for me to realize I was in love with her. But waking up tomorrow knowing there was no Mad on the agenda seemed like a prospect worth offing myself for.
“Please.” Her voice trembled. “Leave.”
I pressed my fingers to her door, then walked away, respecting her boundaries for the first time since I’d met her. They said doing the right thing made you feel good.
They were wrong.
It felt shitty to do the right thing. Downright stupid. When I was back on the street, I looked up at her window, ignoring the rain pounding on m
y face. I saw her face pop behind the glass. She was crying.
And as I got into my Uber and the drops kept running down my face, I thought maybe so was I.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
MADDIE
I’d done it.
I stood up for myself.
Martyr Maddie no more. I went against Chase Black. Flat-out refused him. I cut things off with Ethan. I even sent Katie a message, explaining how okay I was with her dating my ex-something. I was taking a proactive stance in my life.
So why was I feeling anything but empowered?
I’d always thought standing up for myself would feel celestial. Like a fully grown butterfly bursting out of a cocoon, flapping its colorful wings. In practice, I felt grossed out with myself by the way I’d turned Chase away on the day he’d hurried to the clinic to take a paternity test. I felt so empty I could feel my bones rattling inside my body as I set foot in the studio the next morning. New York Fashion Week was mere weeks away. August had bled into September, and my sketch was ready and submitted to Sven. We were supposed to start stitching the dress today. The model was supposed to be on her way to the office. Sven told me he had taken our discussion about the sketch to heart. Not only had he not made one change to my sketch, but he’d also suggested we use an everyday woman to model the dress. And by “everyday woman,” he still meant a nineteen-year-old, ridiculously gorgeous model with perfect skin and silky hair. But unlike most runway models, she was a whopping size six. Super skinny and fit to the rest of the world, but on the curvy side in fashion standards.
All I had to do was see the production of the dress through, stage by stage.
“If it isn’t the office mattress. Grab a ticket, gentlemen. Everyone gets a lay,” Nina proclaimed as I skulked into the office. We were the only two people in. Everyone else at Croquis liked to be fashionably late. Yesterday, Nina had reached an all-time-bitch level. The type normally saved for Korean high school dramas and daytime soap operas. When I’d gone downstairs to buy a salad, condoms had spilled at my feet from my shoulder bag. She’d crammed them into it when I wasn’t looking.
“Shut up, Nina,” I said tiredly, collapsing into my seat and powering up my laptop.
Realizing I’d actually answered her back, Nina whipped her head around, twisting her mouth in distaste. She was wearing a Stella McCartney black day dress paired with flat Louboutins. “So now you have a mouth? I mean, for more than blowing important men? Figures.”
Figures? What did she mean?
“Seriously.” I rolled my eyes, fed up with her crass behavior. “That mean-girl cliché is super early 2000s. It’s 2020. Throw shade. Finstagram me. Graduate from petty slut-shaming me. This is getting real tiring.”
“You’re so lucky to not have any principles,” she continued, undeterred. “I bet I could get where you are if I chose to let the right people in the industry get a piece of me.”
I snapped my laptop shut. “Nina,” I warned, finally taking a good look at her. She was shoving pictures of her with her lobbyist boyfriend into a cardboard box. Her eyes were red. She was . . . oh God, she was packing.
“Spare me your victory speech, okay? I got fired yesterday, as you’re well aware. Sven handed me my notice personally. Said something about Chase Black bringing his attention to the HR manual of Croquis. Apparently, Mr. Black read the entire thing yesterday while waiting at the clinic for some type of results—for what, he wouldn’t say. Hopefully for chlamydia. And hopefully it turned out positive. Anyway, Chase was super happy to let Sven know I am apparently bullying you.” She sniffed. But I knew she was talking about the paternity test. “Whatever, I don’t even care. My first-choice internship was Prada, the second Valentino. Croquis was my fifth choice.” She quickly wiped a tear that slid down the tip of her nose.
I stood up, making my way to her. She grabbed one of the boxes and turned her back to me. I tugged at the fabric of her sleeve. “Look at me,” I said harshly. No sign of Martyr Maddie in sight. I was pissed, and I owned it.
She looked down, shaking her head.
“Nina.” My voice grew sharper. “You are bullying me.”
“It’s just banter!” she cried. Bullshit.
“Why do you hate me so much?”
She looked up, giving me a duh look. “Why wouldn’t I? Look at you. You have horrible taste in clothes, yet you feel so comfortable in your own skin. You’re the uncoolest person I’ve ever met, no offense. Yet you’re probably Sven’s favorite employee. Men like Chase Black throw themselves at you and have bathroom sex with you and fire people for you. You are way ahead of the game for our age, and you didn’t even go to a good college. You just . . . have it all together. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem natural for a twenty-six-year-old. It feels like you got a lot of shortcuts.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that my life is not all unicorns, hearts, and baked goods?” I was surprised by the fact I was yelling at her, and yet here I was—literally screaming at her. “I’m super insecure about . . . well, most things, really. I live in a tiny apartment with a dog I am mostly allergic to. My love life is a disaster, my mom died when I was a teenager, and I never fully recovered from her loss. To stay on top of my game, I pretty much had no social life for the past five years and focused on working my way up. Staying an intern wasn’t a luxury I could afford, as it meant I’d be homeless. Which was why I got a quick promotion from Sven, at the price of my working fifty-hour weeks. The grass is always greener through someone else’s Instagram filter. No one has their shit together. Fully, anyway. We’re all just pretending we know what we’re doing. Those of us who do it with a smile on our face just look like we’re enjoying it more.”
Nina sniffed. “Well, yeah, I guess, but . . .”
“You’ve been a petty, jealous, out-of-control bitch to me, Nina. And I cannot and will not allow anyone to treat me like this anymore. Enough is enough. To be honest, you probably deserve to get fired. You stuffed my bag with condoms, for crying out loud. But you know what? I don’t want your unemployment on my conscience, so I’m going to give you one chance. I’ll talk to Sven about letting you keep this position. He will probably listen, seeing as I’m the person who got picked on. But you have to promise me you won’t let the green-eyed monster get ahold of your mouth and say awful things to me ever again. Jealousy is like a fart. It stinks, we all have it, but it is best to keep it inside or release it when absolutely no one can see or hear us. Am I understood?”
She stared at me in shock, blinking the tears away from her vision.
“Nina, answer me.”
“Yeah,” she whispered, still mesmerized by the one-eighty I’d done. “I promise. I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
“You should be.”
“I am.”
There was a pause.
“Why are you doing this?” She rubbed the bridge of her nose, wincing. “You don’t have to. Yet you’re still nice to me, even when giving me shit.”
“Oh,” I said breezily. “I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing this for me. Being good makes me sleep better at night. It’s not that I don’t suffer from the same symptoms as you—jealousy, heartache, insecurity. They’re the side effects of being alive, pretty much. But I learned a simple thing recently. That gap between reality and our dreams? That’s where life is tucked.”
In the end, I couldn’t do it.
Walk away from Chase without clearing the air, no matter how badly I knew I’d hurt if I saw his face again. Plus, there was the small matter of giving him back his trillion-dollar engagement ring.
The worst part was that it wasn’t even a conscious decision. I didn’t go through the normal route of picking up the phone and calling or texting him to set up a time and a place. You know, like a sane person would. I just found myself going to his place after work unannounced.
I hoped—fine, prayed—I’d have a few minutes alone in the apartment so I could compose myself (translation: have a mental breakdown and wash my face). The odds were in my favor
. I knew Chase’s schedule, and it included visiting his parents after work to check on his father.
The doorman at his building, an older gentleman named Bruce, knew me by face and showed me in. Guess that was the upside of being the uncoolest person in the universe, as Nina had dubbed me. I didn’t look like the type to empty a billionaire’s apartment of possessions and jewelry.
“Haven’t seen much of you lately. Mr. Black has been a bit of a sour face since you stopped coming.” Bruce led me to the elevator. I still had the key from our first rodeo. Chase had never asked for it back, and I hadn’t exactly been in the mood to initiate more conversation with him. I pushed Chase’s door open just as my phone pinged with a message.
Sven: Bad news. The Dream Wedding Dress model never showed up. She was on location.
Maddie: Crap! Can we reschedule?
Sven: We don’t have time. We need to start making it tomorrow if we want to get everything on time. Aren’t you a size six?
Maddie: Sure. I’m also half her height.
Sven: Send me your measurements. I’ll adjust it accordingly when the prima donna can finally see us for a fitting.
I gave him my measurements and hit send. For the next hour, I gave myself a tour of Chase’s apartment, filing everything away in my memory, knowing it was the last time I was going to visit him. For real, this time. The azaleas, as I’d suspected, were nowhere to be seen. Not in any of the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the living room, or the kitchen. Finally, I collapsed on his couch, stared at the ceiling, and let out a sigh. I didn’t remember the exact moment I fell asleep. By the time I was jarred awake, my phone indicated it was close to one in the morning. I heard Chase messing with the lock outside his apartment and sat up straight, prying away the bits of hair that stuck to the dry saliva on my cheeks.
I heard his keys drop to the floor, a groan, and then a woman huffing and picking them up for him. A woman.
Déjà vu of the day Chase had walked into his apartment with a stranger slammed into me. I darted up, ready for a fight. Not that there needed to be one. We weren’t together anymore. Or ever. Yet I couldn’t help but think of him as mine.