“We’re good friends.” He shrugs.
My throat tightens, threatening to close, as I do my best to push the tears that are pooling in my eyes back. “We are.” My voice strained to my own ears. If he can’t hear it, he’s fucking deaf.
“I don’t have a lot of friends since I moved here,” he mumbles, almost as if he’s trying to convince himself we should value the friendship more than the obvious connection we have.
My stomach clenches at his words, heart threatens to beat out of my chest, and I’m doing my best not to have a full-on breakdown right here. I can feel it, the bit of hope I had for us to expand on what happened at Christmas is going down like the Titanic. I have to get out of here before I embarrass myself further. “Stop.” I struggle to close the Styrofoam container. Each time I shove the tabs into the hole, it pops back out, until one of them breaks off. “Fuck!”
“Here, let me help you.” He’s reaching out.
“No, I got it.”
“You didn’t let me finish what I was going to say.” His brown eyes all but pin me against the passenger door.
“I don’t need to hear it. I’ve heard the friend-zone speech one too many times.”
“It’s so easy with you,” he continues.
“Sullivan, I said I don’t want to hear it.”
When I finally get the container closed, I toss it on his dash.
“Shelby, I don’t want either of us to get hurt.” He grabs my hand, but I yank it away as soon as I feel the warmth of his touch.
Too late.
“I understand.” I chew on my bottom lip to keep from sobbing. “But right now I have to go to an appointment I forgot about.”
“Shelby, you don’t understand.” He tries to soften the blow, but it’s there. A huge hole in my stomach - big as a cannon blast.
“Sorry, I should have remembered. My client will probably be pissed.”
“Shelby, stop.”
Opening the door, I step out with one leg, before turning to face him. “I’ll see you around the apartment complex?”
Before he can say anything else, I’m out the door, speed walking to my office, praying to God he doesn’t follow me. I need to fall apart, then put myself back together, and I need to do it in private.
How stupid could I have been to think he’d want more from me than one night of a good time?
He didn’t even get the good time. Reaching down, I take off my heels, and finish the sprint to my office.
Opening the door, I throw the shoes on the ground, and then hurriedly lock it, collapsing against the solid wood. It’s strong enough to take the weight of me and ten others, but I’m not sure it can withstand the heaviness of my broken heart.
I let the tears fall, stream down like rain. My breath comes in huge gulps as I struggle across the hall to where the bathroom is.
“It’s okay,” I whisper. “You’ll be fine, Shelby. You’ll pull through this and come out on the other side like you always do.”
Taking a few deep breaths, I do my best to calm down. Eventually the tears stop and I get some paper towels to wipe off my face. Looking in the mirror is jarring. My makeup is wrecked; mascara and eyeliner are smudged and all the lipstick is chewed off my lips.
“This isn’t the end of the world,” I say out loud as I start to repair the smudged makeup. “You never really had him, girl.”
But I’m seriously not sure if I’ll be able to repair the damage to my heart as easily.
Chapter 6
Sullivan
I watch her run away, glued to my seat.
Get up!
Go after her!
But I can’t seem to make myself move. This didn’t go the way I imagined it would at all. In my mind I’d always pictured us talking about the night of the Christmas party in a controlled environment. We would laugh remembering how hot we were for one another, then we’d admit we both had feelings for each other, ending with a fucking replay of what happened that night.
The only thing I can do is beat my palm against the steering wheel. Why didn’t I go after her?
Inhaling deeply, I grab up the food and take it over to one of the homeless men who uses our square as his home. I’ve completely lost my appetite. Irritated beyond belief, I start up the car and head toward the apartment complex I call home.
Halfway there, my phone rings. For two seconds I think about not picking it up, but when I see the smiling face of my sister, I answer quickly.
“Hey.”
“You sound extremely excited to hear from me. Are you okay, Sully?”
What I wouldn’t give to lay all this down at her feet, but she’s probably calling me about wedding preparations and there’s no way I’m going to take away the joy of this time in her life. “I’m fine, just had a rough day. What’s happening?”
“Cutter told me he hasn’t been able to touch base with you yet, but he wants you to be one of his groomsmen.”
The heaviness of my heart lifts slightly. No matter how I’m feeling about my own life, Ro and Cutter have one of the best things going I’ve ever seen. “He wants me to be a groomsman?”
“Yeah, I know it doesn’t mean as much coming from me, but we’re trying to tag-team this wedding.”
“No, I understand we’ve been busy as hell too. Neither one of you owe me an explanation. What do I need to do?”
“Get fitted for your tux within the next week? We don’t have a whole lotta time.”
The way she’s speaking makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. “I thought you two weren’t in a big hurry. Why within the next week?”
She’s quiet in a way that makes me nervous. I’ve heard my sister quiet before, and this kind of silence almost has me turning the car around and heading to the ambulance bay to beat Cutter’s ass.
“Nothing bad.” I can hear the smile in her voice. “I found out yesterday I’m pregnant,” she whisper-shouts to me. “You’re the first person I’ve told, and I wish I could do it in person, but you know how life is right now. We want to get married before I start showing.”
I have to pull over to the side of the road. “Ro? You’re pregnant?”
“Barely,” she whispers. “We haven’t been trying, but we haven’t been preventing either. Both of us knew we wanted kids, so we went for it. It happened a lot sooner than we expected.”
“Are you okay with it?”
Knowing how she lost Etta, I want to make sure her mental health is taken care of.
“I am, I’m excited. We plan on getting married in the next two to three months. Ruby and Whitney are working on it together,” she mentions members of the Kepler family who run an event planning business. “They assured me they’d be able to make this happen. Hell, Whitney even came out of retirement for it.”
“This is what you want?”
“This is exactly what I want, Sully. It’s everything with the right man.”
“I’m happy for you, Ro, so happy.”
“Thanks, Sully, I’m happy too.”
We hang up, and immediately I have a feeling of loss. Of never having what she has. Letting moments slip through my fingers and not forcing myself to make others understand. The look in Shelby’s eyes as she walked away from me, it’s haunting.