The light’s not the best, but she’s definitely recovered from my right hook. Stacey’s face morphs into a little smirk. She’s had her brows filled in and her blond hair is less softball-practice-and–Sun In and more super-expensive balayage.
Her palm is still on Grey’s chest. Grey realizes it the same moment I do and hastily moves away.
Stacey laughs, her eyes shining as they loop from myface to Grey’s, reading the situation. “And isthiswhat it looks like?”
“Yeah. It is,” Grey says, and pointedly steps around Stacey and grabs for my hand, tugging me away toward the parking lot.
But Stacey’s not done.
“What is it with you and my sloppy seconds?” she calls after me. “First Jake and now Grey?”
I stop dead in my tracks, pulling Grey to a halt.
“Oh, you didn’t know?” she says. “Grey and I dated for the last two years. Who do you think held my hand on the ride to the hospital after you punched me?” I wince, and this hurts more than what Stacey did to my eye at that last softball game.
Grey tugs at my hand. “Dated.Past tense. Come on, Liv, I’ll explain.”
But my heels are planted on the concrete.
“Oh, yeah, explain,” Stacey says. “Don’t forget the part where I dumped you and you were so upset you wrapped your car around a tree.”
I shut my eyes.
The wreck.
I just totaled my car, busted my collarbone, and my hard-ass mom took away all my driving privileges and refused to buy me another car.
“I wasn’t upset,” Grey snaps.
She cuts him off with a single laugh. “You were three beers in—which is worse. Too drunk to drive, too emotional to Uber.”
When I open my eyes, Grey’s face is pale and his hand has gone clammy around mine.
He didn’t just want to hide his concussion from recruiters. He needed to hide the fact that he drove drunk, too—no college wants to touch a quarterback stupid enough to do that with a ten-foot pole.
The concussion. The drunk driving.Two yearswith Stacey.
What else is he hiding?
And then—I see it. As clear as the perfect pitch coming my way, begging to be smashed.
Recruiting me, befriending me, even the starry eyes and kisses no one saw.
I’m not just his girlfriend—I’m a means to an end.
Because what better way to push back against a broken heart than to date the girl who shattered Stacey’s nose?
And thelies. The lies by omission over the course of our relationship are suddenly so dense, piling together and splitting apart until I’m blinded by the spread of them.
Again, Grey tries to tug me away, to the privacy of Helena the Honda and then to celebratory pancakes with friends. But I’m frozen in place.
I slip my hand free of Grey’s.
Now Stacey’s the one moving, sweeping past us. Sheturns midstride, teeth flashing. They’re whiter than they were all those months ago, too. It’s like she got a makeover simply for this moment. “Rodinsky, I almost feel sorry for you. Not only is your whole relationship a revenge plot, but it’s a shitty one. Because guess what? I don’t actually care what Grey does with his time. Orwhohe does.”
And that’s when I walk away. Because I don’t need to hear a single thing Grey has to say.
30
