Page 38 of Playing With Love

“Yes.”

“Good. Go to sleep.”

The line went quiet. I glanced at my phone hoping she’d hung up. She hadn’t.

“Go to sleep, Liza,” I repeated.

“You hate me,” she whispered.

If it was only that easy.

A week ago, I would’ve told her it would’ve been impossible for me to ever hate her. Now she didn’t get that from me.

“Go to sleep.”

“I lied.” My jaw clenched harder. “Don’t you wanna know what I lied about?”

Christ.

In an effort to end the call, I told her, “I know what you lied about.”

“You do?”

If I wasn’t pissed as shit, her breathy ‘you do’ would’ve been cute.

Now, not so much.

Now, I was pissed and getting angry.

Ten fucking years. Eight of those I considered her one of my closest friends. All of those I’d loved her. And not only had she thrown it away, she’d shit all over it, and turned her back on me. My Liza, loyal to the bone, had turned her back on me. There was a lot I was willing to forgive. I understood her head hadn’t been in the right place and she’d needed time. Two years was long enough for her to pull her shit together about her ex. Two years was long enough for her to lick her wounds and make her approach to fix what she’d broken. She hadn’t reached out and I saw clear—she’d never intended to heal the breach.

The past was the past.

And it was better left there.

“I do,” I confirmed. “And before you ask, I don’t give a fuck why you did. You wanted to leave the past in the past, that past being the last decade as well as the recent past. All of it. There’s nothing to talk about. Nothing to explain.”

“There is.”

Jesus fuck.

“Okay, Liza, then how about this, I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to hear your excuses or your bullshit.”

Another pause. Another glance at my phone hoping she ended the call.

“Woman, I got shit to do.”

“This isn’t you.”

Was she for real?

“It’s not?” I asked. “Seems neither of us knew the other as well as we thought we did.”

“Ouch,” she whispered.

Instead of letting the pain in her voice register I focused on the monumental task of keeping the building tension in the back of my skull from exploding.

Then I wondered why the fuck I was waiting for her to end the call.