Now I’ve had a taste of spice, and guess what?
It burns.
It burns so damn bad.
Hurt coated Tripp’s face at my words, and it killed me to see—even if it was his own fault.
I could’ve been okay. Not good. Not happy. But okay. There’d been no discussion of monogamy. Hell, I’d been the one to add the stipulation that it was just physical because I wasn’t looking for anything more. We weren’t together. We liked each other, sure. But at the end of the day, we were fuck buddies.
If he wanted to spread that kind of friendship across the land, that was his prerogative.
But I drew the line at lying. I’d had enough of that to last a lifetime.
Tripp dropped his head, and I thought it was with guilt. Our sexual arrangement wasn’t salvageable, but if he would apologize, maybe there was hope for our professional one. But he wasn’t taking an introspective moment.
He was reading. He picked up the paper, his brows lowering as his lip curled. “I didn’t write this shit.”
“Maybe you were under the influence.”
“No. I didn’t write it. It doesn’t even sound like me. I barely used Kaya when I had it because the whole thing was underwhelming and exhausting. I wasn’t sending messages like this. I’m not some desperate incel perv.” He grabbed the rest of the stack, sorting it into two piles with what I guessed were the duplicates getting tossed aside. He was halfway through when he slammed one down. “There. Look.”
I skimmed the horny messages as stomach acid ate away at my insides like toxic sludge. “Wow. Thank you for making me see this.”
He quickly tapped the upper corner of a particular cheesy text. Tripp had always been good at saying deliciously naughty things that sent heat through me. Apparently, he didn’t expend the creative effort in hookup apps. “Right here.”
I dragged my focus to the label. “Yeah, I get it. It was before we started messing around. I already said that.”
“This was the day I filmed all the promo for Old Flame.”
“Okay?” He’d also invited me to dinner that night, and I’d almost given in. It seemed he’d found a different way to occupy his time.
“This waswhileI was filming. You had my phone all day.”
I rocked back on my heels.
He was right. Even when he came to me or I went to him during breaks, he never took his cell when I offered it. There was no way he could’ve sent the messages.
Tripp pushed one pile closer. “These are mine.”
I skimmed through them. There weren’t any corny pickup lines. No badly phrased naughtiness as he tried to force sexting to happen. There was very little effort at all in his short messages. Like he claimed, his boredom came across in the lackluster texts.
They were nothing like the ones he sent me, asking about my day or saying something filthy-sweet.
He pushed the much larger pile closer. “None of these are mine.”
Those were in stark contrast to what he’d sent. The messages were long. Whoever tried to play it up like the cool actor, but their neediness was evident as they pushed for returned dirty talk and nudes. It was gross.
“Where’s your phone?” I asked.
Tripp stood and grabbed it from near the sink before handing it to me. I unlocked it and went to his account, pressing the little button to redownload the dating app.
“You still don’t believe me?” he asked softly, his brows lowered as he watched what I was doing. He made no effort to snatch back the phone or anything dodgy that would come across as guilty or sneaky. He just looked like he was trying to figure out what else he could do to prove his innocence.
It was unnecessary. “I do. But that means someone else is pretending to be you, and who knows what they’re doing and saying.”
“It happens a lot,” he pointed out. “There’s a few dozen Tripp Carters sending bullshit Instagram messages to fans or creating Facebook pages to track my life. I gave up trying to get them shut down and focused on the actual stalkers, not the cyber ones.”
I lowered his phone. “You have actual stalkers?”
