She paused for a moment too long, because Jack almost got into the bubble she’d created for herself brandishing signature drinks. Hannah wheeled around, but her back was to the ice sculpture. He got closer, and she was about to start crying. Desperate to hold on to her rage, she grabbed the ice pick the sculptor had left.
“Hannah—”
“Come any closer, and I’ll pop your balls like fucking balloons.”
He looked from her face to the ice pick, as though he was considering the risk. As though she might be worth deflated testicles. There was a long beat of silence between them, when tears threatened again. But she kept his gaze. He might have destroyed any chance she would even think about trying to be in a relationship again, but he hadn’t destroyed her. She refused to give him that.
“Hannah, what are you doing?” Annalise’s voice was hushed but tight.
Still, she didn’t break eye contact with Jack. “We’re breaking up, Annalise. You were right. I’m not the relationship type.”
“That’s not true, Hannah.” Jack sounded earnest, but he’d sounded earnest a whole lot during the course of their farce of an affair. “Why would you ever think that?”
The urge to strike back at him was too great. When she’d come over here, she’d wanted to make a scene and make him leave. But now she wanted to hurt him. Just for pretending to be the good guy right now. Not to mention, she wanted to save just a bit of pride—hard as that might be after throwing multiple drinks and threatening serious bodily injury.
“I only dated you on a bet.”
Jack shook his head as though he didn’t believe it.
“It wasn’t a bet—” Annalise felt the need to interject.
“It wasn’t?” Hannah finally looked at her boss. “You didn’t want to give me this wedding, so you bet me that I couldn’t get anyone to date me for more than two weeks.”
“So, you used me, too?” She didn’t even look at Jack when he spoke. This wasn’t about him anymore. Not really.
“You didn’t think I could do it, and that I would just happily go back and be your good-time girl, didn’t you?”
Annalise backed away from her, and Hannah realized that she was still holding the ice pick. She glanced back at Jack and put it down on the table. “Yeah, I used you, too. It was all fake.”
She turned to leave and ignored Jack’s “Hannah, wait—”
In the background, Annalise said, “Maybe take the rest of the night off, and we’ll talk about this on Monday.” She’d be getting her ass fired on Monday, but she was actually more upset about everything that had happened with Jack right now.
She threw up two middle fingers at Jack and walked out, passing a bunch of guys in FBI windbreakers as they walked in.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
YOU FUCKED UP.” THAT was a rude awakening, especially coming from her best friend.
Hannah sat straight up in bed at her best friend’s cursing. Sasha hated the f-word. When they’d first become friends, in college, Sasha had refused to say the swear words when doing rap songs in karaoke, which Hannah had found impossibly charming—especially since that gave her permission to curse very loudly. Getting woken up from a dead sleep with her roommate cursing at her was less so.
“How did I screw up?”
Sasha sat down on the foot of her bed and offered a steaming cup of coffee, the only reason Hannah didn’t ask her to leave. She wasn’t exactly up for being around people or being told about all the things she’d done wrong.
All the ways she’d been stupid about Jack.
She merely wanted to lick her significant wounds in private and build the armor back up around her heart. This time, she’d turn into titanium. But she couldn’t do that with Sasha making her see how she’d been in the wrong as well. “He’s the one who used me to get a news story.”
“Just like you used him to get a promotion?”
The hot coffee scalded her tongue and throat, but that wasn’t why she choked. Sasha was right. She had lied to Jack. Even though she’d already liked him more than she would ever admit before she’d decided to use him to show Annalise that she wasn’t a total shrew. She’d gone ahead with it anyway.
Part of her wondered whether things could have been different, whether she could have been honest with Jack from the start. But she knew she never would have done that. Telling Jack that she needed him, after one kiss and a bunch of texts, would have required her to be vulnerable to him, and it would have required her to trust him. Before Jack had wheedled his way into her life—and her heart—she hadn’t been able to do either of those things.
And, since he’d taken her trust and smashed it into a million pieces in a very public way, she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to trust anyone enough to give them her heart ever again.
“I didn’t mess up, Sasha.” She blew on the surface of her coffee and took another sip. “Jack just proved me right. My only mistake was that I ever trusted him at all.”
Sasha sighed heavily and looked up at the ceiling as though she needed guidance and strength from above. “You didn’t see it at all, did you?”
“See what?” Hannah grew incensed. Her best friend was frustrated with the wrong person here. She should be frustrated with the patriarchy, not her. “I saw last night that a man I really liked—” There was no need to say that she’d fallen in love with him, even if it was totally true. “I’m so humiliated—all that stuff he did. For his job. And then I threatened him with an ice pick.”
“Listen, I’m not certain Jack hadn’t already planned to tell you—” Sasha paused for a breath but continued before Hannah could get ramped up enough to argue with her. She needed much more than a few swallows of coffee to have this conversation. “It was all very weird and mortifying in a way that we need to process.”
Oh Jesus. Sasha’s degree in psychology rearing its ugly head again.
“I don’t know that he was ever going to tell me. And the humiliation isn’t even over. Jack is writing a story about how I fell for his game and then he strung me along and abused my trust for two weeks.”
Sasha shook her head and her brow furrowed in a way that it always did when she was very determined. “I saw the way he looked at you, Han.”
“We hadn’t had sex yet. He was only looking at me that way because he didn’t get what he wanted.”
“Shut up.” Hannah was stunned speechless. Her flawless, naïve, Irish Catholic rose of a best friend was cursing and telling her to shut up? Unprecedented. “Stop making this about sex. The way he was looking at you wasn’t about sex. Not at all.”