I did my best to push my racing thoughts to the side as I stepped out onto the rooftop restaurant to meet up with Liv for lunch. I’d been doing good at staying away from her apartmentandher brother. I figured if I didn’t see him, I didn’t have to acknowledge what we did, and I could block it out like a bad dream. But just because I didn’t see him with my eyes, it didn’t mean he wasn’t living rent-free in a big ass condo inside my head, like his dick had been living rent-free in my pussy. Oak wasstillthe best dick I’d ever had. I’d never had a nigga talk me through the dick down the way he did. Thinking about it made my toes curl and had me ready to dry hump anything like a dog in heat.
Pull it together, bitch.
I approached the hostess station, and she led me over to a corner cocktail table where Liv was already seated. The Chicago skyline stretched on for miles as the distant sound of lunchtime traffic hummed below us.
“Hey, girl.” Liv greeted me as I took my seat across from her.
“Heyyyy. Sorry I’m late. Trying to find parking down here during the lunch hour is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”
“No worries. Do you know what you want to order? I’m starving,” she said, swiping her long, black hair behind her ears as she looked over the menu.
I nodded while quickly glancing over the food options. “I think I’m going to do the grilled cheese and tomato soup. I need something comforting,” I replied with a heavy sigh.
Liv eyed me closely, immediately noticing how off my game I was without me having to say it. “This still can’t be the hangover talking, right?”
“No. It’s not that. But speaking of hangovers, please remind me to never,everdrink that much again or go that hard on the dance floor. My thirty-year-old bones are still trying to recover.”
She giggled. “Mine too. I woke up the next morning with my clothes still on, hanging halfway off the bed with half a chicken nugget lying on the pillow next to me. It was crazy.”
Our laughter trailed off as our waiter approached, took our food orders, and delivered a pitcher of ice water and an iced tea for Liv. Once she left, we remained silent for a few beats, taking in the skyline and watching the waitstaff glide between the tables in their sections, taking and delivering orders.
“So, what’s up with you and Pat? Where are things with the wedding? Fill me in!” Liv finally spoke up.
My lips twisted to the side as I shrugged off her questions. “Shit, I wish I knew.”
“Have you two spoken?”
I nodded slightly. “Yeah. Here and there. We’re supposed to be going to dinner tonight to talk.”
I’d never had the chance to fill her in on our conversation the night of her birthday, and hadn’t had the mental bandwidth to bring it up after what went down between Oak and me.
“So what happened? What did he say?”
I huffed. “He gave me some lame ass excuse about his flight being delayed and how they didn’t have any reserves to cover it, so he had an overnight somewhere and lost his phone, blah, blah,” I explained briefly.
Her perfectly arched brows creased. “Seriously? So who the fuck had his phone?”
“That’s what I said. I mean, I’d have to be stupid to believe that, right?”
“I mean . . .” She paused to blow out an exaggerated huff. “It does sound suspicious as fuck. I’m not gon’ lie to you there, girl.”
“I knowwwww,” I whined. “Which is what makes it ten times harder to decide on which way to carry this shit.”
“What is your heart telling you to do?”
I rolled my shoulders to shake off the weight of stress on me. “I don’t know. It’s like I’m torn. I guess I’ll see what he has to say tonight, but I don’t know. My heart ain’t in it like it was.”
“And how do you feel about that?”
I sighed while glancing around uneasily. “I don’t know. I wish I did, but I don’t. It’s like I don’t know shit I thought I did about our relationship anymore.”
I was in the most uncomfortable state of indecision I’d ever been in. I had to decide on a course of action, but I was still in the back of the struggle bus trying to figure out which way I’d go.
“Do you really think he’s . . .” she wondered out loud, letting her voice trail off so that I would fill in the blank.
“What?”
“No, never mind,” she said as her hoop earrings shifted from left to right. “I don’t even want to speak that shit into existence if that really wasn’t him on the voicemail.”
