AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Crap. That was Charlie. I went still and silent. I didn’t want to face the real world yet.
“Bethany Parker!” she called again. Yikes, she was using my full name. My Pavlovian response was to cross my fingers and hope I wasn’t grounded for the entire weekend. “I heard Lorelai and Sookie. I know you’re in there.”
Welp, there was no ignoring her now. I headed over to the door and opened it. I put a hand up to stop her. “Don’t say it. I know I’m a mess and disgusting and need to shower. I amwallowing.”
She wrinkled her nose. Did I smell that bad? “Why don’t you go shower while I clean up a little, and then we can wallow together.” She lifted a pint of Cherry Garcia ice cream.
Unfair. I could never turn down Cherry Garcia. I turned away from the door and walked past my couch toward my bathroom while Charlie let herself in. Her rounded tummy made her waddle as she walked to my kitchen and started gathering trash. Had I mentioned how useless I’d been the last few days? DoorDash was my friend. Walking out to the dumpsterwasn’t.
I felt better when I got out of the shower, much as I’d expected, but didn’t want to admit it to anyone else. Charlie had cleaned my little kitchen and was sitting on the couch watching the rest of theGilmore Girlsepisode when I joined her with the pint of ice cream and a spoon.
She looked at me warily. “You’ve been ignoring me, which freaked me out. Then you ignored your mom, which freaked both of us out, but since she’s in Ohio and soon headed somewhere else, I got to come over and check on you.”
“How did you know I was home?”
“With the way your picture is all over Instagram, I thought it was a safe bet.”
Great. So that meant they hadn’t been able to get rid of everything. I wrinkled my nose. “How bad is it? I haven’t looked in three days.”
She grimaced, tucking some of her mid-length brown hair behind her ear. “Maybe you should still stay off your socials.”
What the heck? I dug my spoon into the ice cream and took a big bite. “I did nothing wrong. Rhett didn’t do anything wrong. He never cheated on Karina, because they were fake dating.”
“Are you sure about that?” she asked gently.
Ugh. Seriously? Charlie really thought I was that delusional? “Yes, I’m sure about that. It was a publicity stunt. We had to keepusa secret so he wouldn’t look like a cheater, but apparently we weren’t very good at it, since there’s so much documentation.”
“How did you not see all those people taking all those pictures?”
I widened my eyes and shook my head. “That’s what I don’t understand. There are so many pictures of us in situations where I thought we were alone.”
“Could Rhett have some stealth security or something? Maybe it was them.”
I thought of Chad and Jax. They were huge and meant to appear imposing, so I didn’t really know if they would qualify as stealthy. And half the time they weren’t with us. Were we still followed?
A bit of ice cream melted off my spoon and plopped on my arm. Charlie gently took the pint from me and returned it to the freezer, bringing back a napkin to wipe my arm. When she sat again, her face was nothing but compassion.
“I know I’ve been weirdly obsessive for a long time,” I said. We both looked at the Rhett cardboard cutout in the corner, then back at each other. “But I genuinely cared about him, Charlie. I know it sounds crazy, but we spent a lot of time together. We were basically a couple, but only at night when we wouldn’t be caught. I realize how that sounds, but what we had together was real, eventually. Or I thought it was. Now I don’t know what to think.” Tears welled in my eyes and rolled down my cheeks. “I’m so angry at myself for crying, because I want to be mad. I don’t want to be sad.”
But the tears wouldn’t stop. Charlie scooted closer on the couch and pulled me into a hug. “I’m sorry it turned out this way.”
I laughed. “Did you expect differently?”
“I didn’t know what to expect. Obviously, you would be so easy to fall in love with, but Rhett...”
“Has his demons?”
“Yeah,” she said unapologetically. “He totally does. I’m sorry they affected you.”
“We all have demons. I just thought he would be willing to confide in me more. I understand he has to be careful about who he trusts, and I can’t expect him to trust me right out the gate, even with Liam’s glowing recommendation. I wanted to believe that after we were dating for a little bit, he would trust me more. That I had proven myself.”
Charlie leaned back and looked at me. “So you didn’t run away from him?”
“No. I got fired and broken up with at the same time. Actually, him sending the assistant to deliver my flight-home information was what clued me in that I was being broken up with.”
She sucked in a breath. “Howdarehe? We should Photoshop him with a terrible sunburn and receding hairline and post it all over your socials.”
I laughed. She wasn’t serious. “I just wanted him to be different.” I drew in a shaky breath. “He was supposed to stay, to fight for me. But he’s just like every other man in my life. I need to wallow for a minute and grieve the loss of what I thought we had. Of his lips and his smile and what a great boyfriend he was... if I can call him that. Is it still an ex when you never had the define-the-relationship talk? Whatever. I need to wallow, and then I can get back to my life.”
