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“Why, so he can invite me to the housewarming party he’ll be throwing with his new wife?”
“So that’s a no.”
No, I haven’t told Gage that I’m moving to Los Angeles to take a job with a new PR company. In fact, I haven’t spoken to him since he left Dubai. Apparently I was a great international pen pal, but he doesn’t need me now that he’s back and probably cozied up in the Jilted “safe house” with his new wife, passing the last few hours until they can go public.
I open the fridge door, and then slam it again, just because.
I’m dealing with it.
“Okay, that’s it,” Marjorie mutters. “I’m putting Steve on baby duty, and your mom and I are coming over there tonight. With wine.”
“That sounds great. As long as the TV stays off.”
“It’ll be good for you to watch it, sweetie. We want to see you before you move next week. Plus you’ve been edgy with each new episode of Jilted. I want to make sure you’re not around sharp objects.”
Edgy? That doesn’t feel like the right word. Destroyed. That sounds much closer.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Come over.”
Ellie
My mom, Marjorie, and I reach a compromise: I’ll watch the finale—they’re not wrong about me needing closure—but not the whole thing. I’ll watch the final half hour, enough to see who he marries, but I’m not going to endure the entire two-hour nightmare of having to watch as he falls in love with someone else.
God. Even so, I don’t think I can watch this.
I hoped that time and distance would prove to my stupid heart that it was a passing, unavoidable crush on a movie star who’d paid attention to a regular girl.
Wrong.
With each passing day, I’m more aware of one unavoidable, heart-squeezing realization: I love Gage.
I’m all the way, hopelessly, maybe a little stupidly in love with Gage Barrett.
“Are you okay, honey?” my mom asks, setting a bowl of popcorn on the table and sitting beside me, hand on my knee. “You look queasy.”
That’s one word for it. I would also throw miserable, idiotic, and heartbroken into the mix.
“Is it because everyone’s talking about how devastated you were that he didn’t use his veto on you? If it makes you feel better, all my friends think he used you horribly. Seducing you like that, and then sending you home.”
“Everyone thinks that,” Marjorie agrees from the kitchen, where she’s wrestling with a wine cork. “Although for the record, when you’re ready to talk about it, I get first dibs on knowing what actually happened during those twenty-four hours when you disappeared.”
I drop my forehead to my knees and let out a crazy laugh.
“Isn’t it obvious, Marjorie?” my mom murmurs as she pets my hair. “She fell in love.”
“Did you?” Marjorie asks, coming into the roo
m with three glasses. “Is that why you’ve been so weird and won’t talk about it?”
I lift my head. “I haven’t been weird.”
“Super weird,” my mom says, patting my knee, then accepting the wineglass Marjorie holds out. “This guy hurt you, Ellie.”
“It wasn’t his fault,” I say, taking a sip of my own wine. “He gave me exactly what I wanted. What I thought I wanted.”
“How’s that?”
“Right before we walked into the house after our time…away…I told him I wanted to go home. Actually, I was kind of begging him to send me home from the very beginning, but there was always some reason to stay, and the longer I stayed the more I realized that I had to go. You know?”
