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“She’s here,” he tells me. “Just walked in the door and she looks like shit.”
“She’s there?” I repeat like a fucking parrot. “In San Francisco.”
“Yes,” he says, and suddenly there’s noise in the background. My sister talking, Violet laughing, and Tori cooing, fucking cooing, at the baby.
“Don’t let her go anywhere,” I order him, suddenly both weak-kneed with relief and absolutely furious all at the same time. “I’m on my way.”
“Yeah,” Ethan snorts right before he hangs up. “Like I hadn’t figured that out already.”
Chapter 25
Tori
“I need a job,” I tell Chloe as she tries to get me to settle on the couch with a glass of wine. But I’ve been in a car for nearly nine hours straight, stopping only when the Tesla needed to charge. Every muscle in my body is tight and I need to stretch. Plus I’m too wired to sit. How can I not be when I’ve had the last eight and a half hours to play my fight with Miles back in my head in a never-ending loop?
“What you need is to tell me what the hell is going on,” Chloe says quietly from her spot in the rocking chair near the window, where she’s nursing Violet.
“No, what I need is a job. And a drink. Not necessarily in that order.”
“Already got you covered,” Ethan says as he comes up behind me and hands me a glass of red wine. I take it, gratefully, then allow myself to sink against him as he wraps an arm around my shoulder in a brotherly embrace. “I’m glad you’re here,” he says, squeezing briefly before making his way across the room to gaze adoringly at his wife and baby girl.
“Is she asleep?” he asks, voice low and eyes locked on Violet’s angelic little face.
“Just drifted off,” Chloe answers.
“Let me take her.” He drops a kiss on my best friend’s mouth before expertly scooping the baby out of her arms. Violet wakes up a little, lets out a small, distressed cry. But he’s pulling her into his chest and shushing her before she even finishes the cry, his voice soft and soothing and so filled with love it’s like an arrow to the fucking heart. Ethan Frost adores his wife and baby girl and isn’t afraid to let the entire world know it.
I’d be jealous, except Chloe deserves every ounce of love he can give her, every second of adoration he heaps on her. No one on the planet deserves a guy like Ethan more than my best friend does. They’ve been through hell together, especially this last year, and they deserve whatever happiness they’ve found together. The fact that they’ve found so much—that they have so much—has me nearly bursting at the seams with happiness for her. Or I would be if I weren’t wallowing in my own angst after my fight with Miles.
?
?Shit!” Chloe exclaims suddenly, drawing my attention back to her as she jumps up from the rocking chair and races across the room to me. “You’re crying!”
“I’m not,” I tell her even as I wipe my eyes and sniffle a few times. “San Francisco makes my allergies act up.”
“Yeah, right,” she says even as she wraps me up in a Chloe-scented hug. “I’ve been here with you at least half a dozen times and I never saw you have allergies before.”
“It’s the fall.” I sniff again, do my best to stem the tears still swimming in my eyes. “There’s different stuff in the air now.”
She pulls me closer. “Okay, baby. You just go on telling yourself that.”
“I will.” I squeeze my eyes shut, press my face into her shoulder, and will myself not to start sobbing. I’m too afraid that if I do, I’ll never stop.
It’s been such a long week—such a long fucking week—filled with so many emotional highs and lows that no matter how hard I try, I can’t stop a few more tears from leaking onto her sweater. No more than I can stop one heartbroken sob from escaping. I manage to beat the rest into submission, manage to swallow them down, but it’s too late. The damage has been done.
Chloe pulls back, her eyes worried as they search my face. “It’s been a hell of a week, huh?”
Another sob escapes. “You have no idea.”
“So tell me,” she says as she links her arm through mine and propels me toward the couch. “Tell me everything. Start at the beginning and leave absolutely nothing out.”
And so I do, starting with the rooftop party where Miles and I danced and I pissed off Alexander before moving on to my dad’s visit to my apartment and his subsequent disowning of me. Chloe’s heard the story before, right after I moved into her and Ethan’s house because I had nowhere else to go, but she’s no less outraged than she was the first time I told her. “Your dad is such a dick!” she says for the millionth time, her green eyes blazing and her voice shaking with rage.
“Yeah,” I answer with a shrug. “But I don’t know. Maybe he was right to do what he did. I’m twenty-three years old. It’s past time I grew up and got my shit together.”
“You are getting your shit together,” Chloe tells me, outraged. “You got your degree, you’re looking for a job, you’ve stopped partying and getting drunk. You’re looking for a decent guy instead of a string of one-night stands that were as much a fuck-you to your family as they were about you getting off. It sounds to me like you’re doing a hell of a good job at getting your life together.”
I laugh. “Yeah, if you don’t count the fact that I’m in the middle of a sex scandal and that I’m living off the generosity of my best friend and her family because I literally have nowhere else to go. I’m totally getting my life together. Abso-freaking-lutely.”
