My head snapped down and I stared at her. “Why in the hell would she do that? You’re out of your minds.”
LJ always went straight to Alexis whenever anything went wrong. If it was me being late somewhere or something going missing, his knee-jerk conclusion was always Alexis, but that wasn’t the case—well, maybe fifty percent of the time.
“You didn’t see the way she was looking at Jules the two times I’ve seen them meet?”
“She has a hard time meeting new people and trusting them.”
“She also looked like if she had a voodoo doll of Jules, Jules would definitely have been in trouble.”
“Alexis would never do something like that to me. She’d never hurt me like that. Look at you and LJ. You jumped in here in a split second trying to chest bump me away. Would you hurt him like that? You’re best friends. Me and Alexis are family.”
“Then how’d they find out the letter was Jules’s?”
Something Jules had mentioned about the recipes…
“They put up her handwriting on each one of the web shows. And if a letter fell out of my backpack, maybe someone matched it up that way. It doesn’t have to be Alexis’s fault every time anything goes wrong. She’s my sister and she wouldn’t do that to me. Besides, she’s never even seen Jules’ writing. She wouldn’t hurt me like this.” I had to believe she wouldn’t. Because doing that to Jules, exposing her private thoughts to me, knowing who it was? That was beyond anything Alexis had ever pulled before. That bordered on unforgivable. I didn’t have many people in the world I could call family, and losing one of them would kill me.
LJ and Marisa looked at each other again like they were speaking some kind of telepathic twin speak and shook their heads. “I hope you’re right, man.” LJ squeezed my shoulder and the two of them left the room, looking back at me like a dude who’d just lost a leg saying he could walk it off.
No matter how these letters were released, they were out in the world and I’d deal with the consequences. TLG was Jules. All those conflicted feelings I’d had about liking Jules when TLG and I were still writing, keeping her at arm’s length not only because of Nix, but because I didn’t want to betray TLG—I should’ve been pissed off. I should’ve wanted to yell at her for lying to me, but now that I went back over everything in my mind, I couldn’t keep the smile off my face.
I’d found TLG. She hadn’t just dropped me and walked away. She’d been right across the street baking for me every day, smiling at me from behind those glasses from her favorite spot with her head on my chest. She’d been in my bed. She’d been too shy to tell me it was her. She was real and in the flesh—and had just broken up with me.
But I wasn’t going to go down easy.
The crap Jules was telling herself about all this, the insecurities she’d been good at hiding and slowly overcoming—that was something hard to come up against. I had twenty-two years of that myself, but I wasn’t going down that easy. I wasn’t going to let her push me away because she was scared.
I was scared too, but I was scared that she’d shut me out and walk away from what we had. A plan formed in my head and I got to work, going to my desk and throwing open the bottom drawer. This was exactly what I needed. The perfect thing to show her she’d always been on my mind and that a little viral sensation wasn’t enough to scare me away. She was so much stronger than she thought, but now it came down to whether or not she thought I was worth the risk.
34
Jules
“Remember what you said to me when I was lying in bed after my break up with Nix?”
I rolled my head to the side and stared at Elle. My hoodie, the one I used to wear every day, that I’d had to search through piles of clothes to find, now covered me like a blanket. It had been weeks since I’d worn it, but I needed the safety of its soft gray cocoon. “You’re completely right to wallow and I’ll bring you more chocolate chunk cookies.”
The corner of her mouth lifted. “Not quite.”
“A pep talk isn’t what I need right now.”
“But it’s what you’re going to get.”
I lay in my bed, staring up at the ceiling. “I can’t. I really can’t. Not right now.” I breathed through the burn in my nostrils like I was seconds away from breaking down again.
“How about I lie with you then?”
I nodded and the bed dipped as she swung her legs up and settled down beside me.
“You have nothing to be embarrassed about.” She tilted her head toward me.
“When people look at you and Nix, they get it. You make sense. Despite knowing you’d been seconds away from removing his balls with an ice cream scoop and the whole getting-him-arrested thing, I never, ever batted an eye at you two dating.”
I sucked in a shuddering breath.
“But with me and Berk. We don’t make sense to people. They can’t figure it out. Like why in the hell is he with her? Is it pity? Is it a dare or a bet? A fetish? And it’s only a matter of time before he starts to wonder the same thing.”
“You know him and you know that’s not the type of guy he is.”
“But can I take that chance? He would destroy me. Not even on purpose—this is bad enough, but once I’m in even deeper than I already am? How could I come back from that? How do you recover from having a piece of your soul shredded? It’s so early and I already feel like I was halfway there.” The tears pooled in my eyes.
I didn’t even know how long Elle stayed with me before leaving for an event they were scrambling to get back on track after the snow. She took the liberty of hiding all my electronics to keep me from tying myself to a whipping post of scrolling social media. And my mother’s messages had been particularly helpful.
Julia, do you have any idea how embarrassing this is for our family?
Julia, we’re going to have to rethink your participation in your sister’s wedding. We don’t want to cause a scandal.
You’d think we were Kennedys or members of the royal family with how important keeping up appearances was to my mother. But for once, her words weren’t the most hateful things I’d had said about me. People behind their keyboards had certainly had a field day with my outing.
Their words floated in my brain, looking for a nice soft place to burrow and infest my thoughts. Classmates from high school had backed up the big reveal with notes I’d scribbled in their yearbooks and everyone was a handwriting expert now.
The internet pitchfork mob had ruined everything. I wouldn’t get to lay in Berk’s arms at night. Watch his face when he walked into the house for the party Alexis and I had planned.
She’d given me her phone number, thawing the ice between us to frigid water. My plans for Berk’s birthday were in play. Anytime I texted her with an idea she’d replied immediately with a ‘Call me!’ Maybe my letter had gotten her to see I wasn’t just a user. I could only imagine the women falling over Berk all the time. When we talked last she’d suggested I recreate a kid’s birthday of sorts. Kind of like the ones you’d have back in the classroom that everyone loved so much because it meant cupcakes instead of whatever math worksheet the teacher had planned.