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“No worries. I’m sure it’ll be great.”
I shoot a glance toward the entrance of the restaurant, wondering where this guy is. It would look pretty fucking pathetic if he was late for dinner.
Compassion comes over me as I look back at my mom. She’s never been the same since the divorce, which got really damn messy. Mom kept the house, and Dad moved to San Diego because that’s where his work is. He bought some bachelor pad condo, and we barely ever hear from him anymore.
“Oh! There they are!”
Mom sits up straighter in her seat, a smile breaking across her face. I turn my head to follow her gaze, and it’s like my vision narrows down to a damn pinprick. Everything in my periphery seems to go black, and can only focus on two faces as they cross the restaurant toward us.
Emma Holloway.
And her father, Paul.
The same fucking man who kissed my mother. The one who caused her goddamn divorce.
They stop in front of our booth, and my first instinct is to launch myself from the table and punch Paul Holloway in the face. My second instinct is to grab Emma Holloway by the waist, drag her into the alley out back, and…
My brain doesn’t know where to go with that thought, torn between violent punishment and something else.
As I stare up at them, I’m filled with a kind of rage I’ve never known before—and I have a lot of experience with rage. Is this really how it’s going to go down? Does Emma really expect me to sit here and have dinner with her and pretend everything is okay? Paul broke up my parents’ marriage, then Emma sealed the nail in the coffin. And now they’re all dressed up and standing in front of our table at Louie’s, Paul smiling like a jackass and Emma looking like she’s about to sink into the floor. I’m glad she looks so miserable. She should look miserable. In fact, I hope she fucking breaks into tears right now.
“Right on time! Have a seat,” Mom says with a smile. She’s beaming at the man I want to murder, and she doesn’t seem to have noticed that I’ve gone still as a statue beside her.
“Great.” Paul smiles back, sliding into the booth so that he’s sitting next to my mother. Emma sits on the other side of him so that I’m looking directly at her in the curved booth.
“Did you have a nice day?” my mom asks Paul, her voice softening as she speaks to him.
“I did.” He squeezes her hand on the table and presses a kiss to her cheek.
All I can see is red. Seriously. I can’t speak, I can’t look away. I’m just staring at Emma and her father, my face set in a grim mask. Mom finally picks up on the tension hanging over us like a cloud, and she glances over at me, her brows drawing together.
Before she can say anything, the waiter comes over to tell us about the specials and hand out menus. I use the opportunity to suck in air through my nose, trying to hear above the rushing in my ears.
My mom and Paul don’t know that we saw their kiss a few years back. And they don’t know that Emma ratted them out about it and brought about the downfall of my parents’ marriage. As far as they’re concerned, this is the first Emma and I know about anything existing between them.
“All right, I’ll go first,” Paul says once the waiter leaves, straightening his tie and speaking back and forth to me and Emma. “We thought it was a good idea to bring everyone together because Claire and I have been seeing each other for a little while now.”
“And things are getting more serious,” my mom chimes in, seemingly to help him out.
“That’s right.” He smiles broadly.
I look over at Emma again, and she still looks like she’s seen a ghost. God fucking dammit, is it wrong that I desire her right now? That even though she looks terrified, she also looks beautiful? That she makes me want to hurt her and heal her at the same time? This kind of confusing shit happens all the time. I’ll be furious with her one second, and then the next, I’ll want her so badly I can’t even fucking breathe. It doesn’t make any sense.
“We know you guys used to be pretty good friends,” Mom goes on. “And we wanted to tell you in person, so that you didn’t hear it from other people.”
“We also just thought it would be fun for the four of us to spend some time together!” Paul says with enthusiasm. “Maybe we can hang out more often.”
I find his statement incredibly lame and forced, and I close my eyes, summoning whatever fucking shreds of self-control I can muster. The thought of the four of us hanging out together makes me want to laugh—or hit something, I can’t decide which.
When I turn my gaze toward my mom, she’s looking at Paul Holloway the way she used to look at my dad when she was in love with him.
Anger fills me once more, and most of it is directed toward Emma. This whole situation is entirely her fault. If Paul and my mom wanted to kiss each other a few times and then move on, all of our lives would’ve remained intact. But because Emma couldn’t let it fucking go, she threw all of our lives into a tailspin.
Not only do I have more motivation than ever to destroy Emma, I also want to destroy Paul Holloway now. There’s absolutely no reason Mom should be looking at him like that. I miss the days when she looked at my father like that, and he returned the sentiment.
None of this shit was supposed to happen.
When the food finally arrives, I pick up my massive knife and dig into my juicy steak. My bites are large and animal-like, and directed toward Emma. I can tell she has no appetite at all, because she just kind of picks at the fish on her plate and looks up at me from time to time. Paul and my mom continue to make small talk because they can tell that Emma and I aren’t saying a thing.
