“What?” I ask carefully.
Please don’t ruin this for me so quickly.Please.
“I’m sorry,” Autumn says softly. She looks down, but raises her phone toward me.
I all but storm across the lunchroom and tear it from her hands. The second the headline hits me, my heart sinks. Not for the reasons that they may think. I’m not anyone’s girlfriend. There is no situation in this life where there being another woman could apply to me. The world doesn’t know that. Whitney and Autumn don’t know that. This Irina Coasta girl doesn’t know that.
But Carter knows that.
I slowly pull out the plastic chair at the lunch table and lower myself into it, pressing play on the video. I watch in horror, my heart aching in my chest, and I force myself to listen and digest every single word that this woman says.
Whitney and Autumn don’t react. They sit in silence behind me. They’ve already watched this, I gather.
She’s pretty. The ‘looks better without makeup’ type of pretty that every woman envies. She wears those small glasses that would look ridiculous on any other human, but she has a face that can pull them off.
I wait for the anger, but it doesn’t come. Its absence is noticeable. It’s heavy.
It’s worse.
Because I feel paralyzing and shattering disappointment in its place.
We slept together last night. After weeks of tiptoeing around it, after feeling bad that Carter has gone months without sex, we finally crossed the line and I felt incredible. It felt special.
And he’s a fucking liar.
He lied to me. He’s been sleeping with this girl the whole time?
He lied.
“Arden?” Autumn asks softly.
I hand her the phone back without meeting her eyes. Running a hand over my face, I rise to my feet. I can’t look at them. I’m humiliated. “I have to get on the floor.”
“Arden,” Whitney tries again.
I spin around. “Look, it’s not real, okay? This relationship. We’ve been faking it to get him out of trouble. That’s all it is.”
Whitney’s brows skyrocket. “What?”
“So, you can wipe those sympathetic looks off your faces. He’s allowed to fuck whoever her wants,” I say, waving my hand out in front of me.
Autumn looks completely and utterly stunned. “But…you slept with him?”
“Yeah,” I bite out, letting out a cold laugh as I swing open the door to the lunchroom. “I won’t make that mistake twice.”
I leave them staring after me, the truth finally in their hands.
Three hours into my shift, Carter texts me.
Carter
Thinking about you. What time should I be at the hospital? I’ll set an alarm.
I don’t answer. I grind my teeth together, seethe, and envision slamming a needle into his face instead of into the patient’s arm who I am about to visit.
The betrayal stings like a bitch.
I knew Carter was complex. He has so many layers, each of them more different and complicated than the last, but one thing I never took him for was a liar. If anything, I thought he was too honest. He signed that contract, he promised, and he lied to get me to have sex with him anyway.
