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“Looks like someone got their appetite back,” I say, making a mental note to text Ida when I leave. “So, anyway.” I swirl my wine. “Back to the topic at hand. Were we or weren’t we friends back in the day? And be honest. Sometimes I look back at my time with Jude and my failed relationships and my dumpster fire of a marriage and I wonder if I’m the common denominator. Is it something I’m doing? Am I off-putting?”
I always thought I had a fair amount of self-awareness, but then again, doesn’t everyone?
“Nah,” he says. “Maybe you just have shitty taste in men.”
I lift my brows and straighten my spine. “Damn. Don’t let Jude hear you say that.”
“Jude knows how I feel about how things went down.”
“Really?” I rest my chin on my hand again, leaning closer. “You stood up for me?”
“It was less about standing up for you and more about pointing out what an idiot he was being, but sure. You can call it that.”
Jude broke up with me the same day he got back from Tulum. Never mind a week of boozing and partying followed by a day of international travel, he couldn’t dump me fast enough. By that point in time, I’d already graduated and was living back at home with my parents for the summer while I searched for a job. Our original plan was that whoever found a job first, the other one would follow. At that point, we were both jobless, and while our careers were uncertain, I’d never worried about our future together.
The whole thing blindsided me.
I never saw or spoke to Stone again after that—until recently. I always considered him a casualty of the breakup. He was always Jude’s friend and that’s where his loyalty belonged. It never felt right to reach out to him for any reason, though I thought of him often.
“Did you ever find someone?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“Romantically. A girlfriend or whatever. You were always so secretive about your dating life,” I say. “I remember being so worried about you because it was like you were living in Jude’s shadow.”
Stone sniffs, his gaze flicking to the side and back. “I never lived in his shadow.”
“You did though. You let him have all the fun and do all the living and you sat back like some loyal henchman.”
“We’re all entitled to our opinions.” He tops off his wine.
“From an outsider’s perspective, that’s what I saw. And that’s what I was when it came to you two … an outsider.”
He tosses back a generous mouthful. “You were about as inside as it gets.”
“It never felt that way to me.”
“You can’t be serious. You were with him damn near twenty-four-seven. You came on every road trip. You slept over every weekend when we lived in the dorms and then you lived with us senior year. For three straight years, I couldn’t eat, sleep, or breathe without you being in a ten-foot radius of me. You were everywhere, all the time.”
“So it did bother you,” I say. “You were just tolerating me all that time.”
His intense gaze catches onto mine, holding it captive for an endless moment.
“It bothered me.” He exhales, his cool blue gaze studying mine. “But not for the reasons you think.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Stone
* * *
Age 21
* * *
“What the hell?” I ask Jude when he creeps through the apartment door Sunday morning.
He fumbles through the dark, kicking off his shoes and nearly tripping over a kitchen bar stool before attempting to sit down.
“I fucked up.” He buries his face in his hands, rubbing his eyes. Though I don’t think he’s crying. Jude never cries. I think he’s probably hung over and exhausted as shit.
“You went home with that redhead, didn’t you?”
His silence makes my stomach sink, despite the fact that deep down I already knew. I knew the second I turned around last night and he was gone. I knew with every step I took back home to an empty dorm.
Jude exhales, and the stench of stale alcohol and cheap perfume fills the kitchen.
“Jovie texted me last night around 3 AM,” I say. “She couldn’t get a hold of you.”
My jaw clenches when I think of him shoving his dick inside some random chick when Jovie was sitting at her parents’ home, worried about him.
“I know,” he says. “She wanted to FaceTime me, but … I couldn’t.”
“Because you were fucking someone.”
Sitting up, he tilts his head back with a groan, staring at the ceiling. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Own it,” I say. “Tell her. Come clean, otherwise it’ll be hanging over your head every time you look at her.”
“She’s going to end it if I tell her.”
“Do you even love her anymore?” For the past year, the intensity of their relationship has gone from scorching hot to a notch above simmering. I’m sure part of it had to do with the newness wearing off, but every once in a while Jude would make a comment that would have me questioning whether or not he was serious about Jovie anymore.
