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Shayna picked up her fork again and took a bite. But she could hardly taste anything around the weird feeling in her belly.
“How was fight club today?” she asked, trying to kickstart the conversation again.
Billy suddenly rose and dropped his napkin atop his half-eaten meal. “Sorry,” he said. “Just realized how late it is. I gotta get back to one of my cases or the night will be a wash.”
Shayna’s heart tripped into an aching sprint. What about the talk he’d wanted to have?
Mo and Noah traded a look before they rose to shake Billy’s hand.
“Why don’t you stay a little longer?” Mo asked, eyebrow raised.
“Gotta pay the bills,” Billy said, his tone flat and tight.
“Remember what we talked about,” Noah said in a low voice.
What was going on? She felt like there was a whole conversation happening but she couldn’t understand the words.
Finally, Billy looked to her. “You okay getting home?”
“Uh, yeah, I Ubered, but what about—”
“Another time maybe. It wasn’t anything big,” he said, and then he was gone.
Shayna felt like they’d just had a fight. Except they hadn’t. Was he really that upset about her moving out? Or was he just pissed off at her for considering a male roommate? Because she couldn’t see any other reason for all the intense weirdness that’d just transpired.
“Wow,” she said. “I’m sorry. I think my news killed dinner.”
“You don’t have nothing to apologize for, Shayna,” Mo said.
She appreciated that he said it, but she couldn’t help but feel like she’d done something wrong. And that started to piss her off. So much so that she was glad when dinner was over so she could be by herself and avoid taking her temper out on anyone else.
She was so filled with restless anger that she spent the night packing. Bags. Boxes. Whatever she could jam her stuff into, she did.
By two o’clock, she was nearly done and completely spent.
Especially when she tried to add writing an email to Ryan on top of it all. She drafted and deleted it at least a half dozen times because it kept ending in a way that essentially said I fell in love with your stupid friend who doesn’t feel anything in return! Thanks for nothing, thundercunt!
Yeah, that wasn’t happening. Even though she knew he’d give thundercunt a solid A.
Finally, she just wrote:
Hey Ry—I just wanted you to know that I found a new place. I’m going to be subletting from a colleague at work who has a really nice three-bedroom rowhouse in NW DC (address below). His name is Malik Morrison and he’s a new reporter at the Gazette, too. I’m pretty psyched about it. Everything else is good. Take care of yourself!
Love, Shayna
It was mostly true. Which was the best she could do just then.
Chapter Sixteen
Billy drove around the city for more than an hour. Just drove. To nowhere and everywhere.
It was a perfect fucking reflection of the chaos whirling in his head.
Shayna was leaving and it was his own goddamned fault. And on top of it all, she was moving in with another man. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, of course, and maybe it shouldn’t have crawled underneath Billy’s skin. But it did. Bad. Because it made him feel replaced and replaceable.
And really fucking jealous.
On top of his terrible session at WFC and his realization that he probably needed to talk to his shrink again, it all combined to brew a toxic cocktail that had turned his blood into a raging fire. He’d suddenly been overwhelmed with a feeling like he was going to explode. And rather than chancing spewing any of that at Shayna or his friends, he’d bounced on dinner like a sonofabitch. He was well aware that nothing about his departure had been inconspicuous or natural, but he couldn’t help it.
