Shelby rolled her eyes and went into the kitchen. I followed her and sat on the barstool at our peninsula counter while she rummaged around for coffee mugs. “The less I say about that, the better.”
“What do you mean?” I needed to go get changed. I had to return this dress, and it was feeling really uncomfortable. Formal wear was not meant to be slept in.
“Harmony pretty much ignored me for the entire evening. I was this close to getting up on her dining room table and doing my old tap-dance routine from junior high, just to force her to make eye contact with me. It’s a good thing I love Allan,” she said as she placed the mugs on the counter. “And I don’t have to ask how your night was because . . . BAM!”
She reached for her laptop and flipped it up. “I wanted to slam it on the counter for the full effect but I don’t want to break it and I need it for work, so . . .” She slid it across the counter toward me.
And there was a picture of me and Noah Douglas. He looked amazing, all self-assured and sexy with the barest hint of a smile. They’d published a picture of me gazing at him instead of at the camera, and it made me uncomfortable. Mostly because I resembled . . . the girl his mother had forced him to take out.
“We look like a set of Goth twins going to an emo prom,” I told her.
“You’re crazy,” she assured me. “You look like a matched set with your dark hair and dark eyes. Like you were meant to be together.”
I sighed. “You need to hurry up and get married so that you can get out of this isn’t-love-so-wonderful phase.”
The picture was listed with Noah’s name on it. No mention of me. Which made sense. Then I scrolled down a little farther, and that’s where the comments started.
Who is this fat ugly skank ho?
I would murder someone to stand next to him like that.
Ick. He could do so much better.
Call me instead, Noah Douglas.
I only ship Noah and Lily and I don’t accept cheap substitutes.
I wish it was me!
And those were the comments that weren’t riddled with spelling errors and grammatical mistakes, and I tried to ignore the ones with inventive swear words.
My stomach turned over, and I felt like I was going to vomit all over Shelby’s laptop. Having gone through a bad round of bullying when I was fourteen, I’d pretty much steered clear of all social media since then, and this was reminding me why.
This was proof I’d made the right call last night when I’d told him I only wanted to be friends. I already knew what it was like to have to endure this type of venom on a daily basis. No way did I want to sign up for that mess again.
Gossip really hit differently when it was about you.
Shelby realized too late what I was doing. “Don’t read the comments!” She shut her laptop screen and pulled it back. “It doesn’t matter what a bunch of tweens and frustrated housewives think. It only matters what he thinks.”
“To be fair, it doesn’t really matter what Noah thinks, either. I told him I only wanted to be friends.”
She stared at me, her mouth open. Then she reached for the most recent issue of American Weekly, rolled it up, and hit me on my arm with it like I was a bad dog.
“What? Why would you do that?” she demanded.
“Ow! Stop!” I grabbed the magazine from her and threw it onto the coffee table behind me. “I don’t like him that way.”
“You are my best friend and I love you, but that is quite possibly the stupidest thing you have ever said to me. You look at him like you’ve been starving for a month and he’s a man-size vat of ice cream.”
“Whatever” was my masterful reply. My phone buzzed, and I reached for my clutch. I had thrown it onto the counter last night when I got home. I emptied out the contents and noted that my phone was about to die. My heart had a moment of hope that maybe it was Noah. But . . . what if he’d seen the picture? That could be a bad thing.
It wasn’t him. It was a text message from . . . my bank. Thrilling. I wondered what credit card I was currently eligible for or what their current low, low rate would be for refinancing my mortgage. The fact that I didn’t have a mortgage never seemed to bother them.
“An uneaten Snickers bar?” Shelby asked. “Isn’t that one of the signs of the apocalypse?”
I reached for the candy bar and put it back inside my purse. “Noah gave it to me.” There’s no way I could ever eat it. I would let it get moldy and stale, or whatever it was candy bars did when they went bad. (Having never let a candy bar go bad, I had no idea what happened to them.) I was going to put it in a box somewhere and pull it out to look at it when I wanted to reminisce.
Shelby’s eyes danced. “So he gave you something and you’re keeping it. For sentimental reasons. Nothing about that says, ‘I want to be just friends.’”
“I keep stuff you’ve given me,” I scoffed.
“Name one thing.”
My mind went blank. I had nothing. “I’m not playing this game with you.”
“Good plan. Because you’d lose.” She poured coffee into one of the mugs before handing it to me. “You should have jumped all over that man. You’re in the world’s worst dry spell.”
“It’s only a dry spell if you’re thirsty,” I said, opting to drink without adding in massive amounts of sugar because I needed the caffeine kick. I grimaced after my first sip. I always forgot how much better coffee tasted after it had been sweetened.
She had both of her hands wrapped around her own mug. “How can you think you’re not thirsty? You’re like a dehydrated man who’s been crawling through the Sahara on his hands and knees for two days with no help in sight.”
“Why am I not a woman in this scenario?”
After she took a sip, she said, “Because only a man would do something stupid enough to get himself stranded in the Sahara.” She set her mug on the counter. “You’ve got to give me something. Because I can tell that he likes you, whether or not you agree with me. There had to be a moment. I’m an old engaged woman. Tell me about the butterflies so that they may live on in my memory.”
At that I laughed and said, “Fine. There was this moment last night where he looked at me like . . .”
“Like?” she prompted, urging me to go on.
“Like how Malec looked at Aliana after their first fight.”
She reached across the countertop to grab my forearm while squealing in delight. “Are you kidding me? I would have died if he ever looked at me that way!”
“Hi, recently resurrected person here.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I got out of the car.”
“You didn’t kiss him?” she asked in utter disbelief.
“We’re just friends. I can’t.”
“You most certainly can! Often, and with a crap ton of passion.”
I went to my old standby. “I’m not dating anyone. You know that. I’m focusing on my business. And kissing leads to dating.”
“I really want to respect your choices and be supportive of you, but as your friend, please know that everything you’re saying is still dumb. You should totally be making out with him.”
When I just shook my head as my response, she came over to sit on the other barstool. “You know I only want the best for you, right? Instead of drawing boundaries, I think you should go with the flow. See where the universe takes you.”