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Chapter1
Eden
“You need a vacation.”
Those four words feel more like a curse than a suggestion, raising my hackles. Flor’s ideas, in general, have a history of either going spectacularly amazing or spectacularly terrible. There’s never an in-between. And considering we’ve been best friends since we were five, I can usually predict which way they’ll go.
Even worse than her regular ideas are her ideas aboutvacations.Usually, those end up with me feeling like some poor, third-wheel, tagalong loser.
“I don’t have time for a trip,” I tell her, running my finger over the trackpad of my laptop to wake it back up. Before Flor had called to pester me about joining her and her husband on their getaway, I’d been working. Just like I always am nowadays. “I have a mountain of work, and I can’t afford to take time off.”
Not if I plan on paying my power bill. Or the rent for my dinky-ass apartment in the horribly untrendy part of the city that’s slowly killing me.
Flor’s quiet for a long moment, which is never a good sign. “Babe.”
I sigh at her tone. I amachinglyfamiliar with it.
“You can’t afford not to. After Captain Asshole—”
“John,” I remind her. My ex… Well, pseudo ex? I don’t even know what to call the dickhead who’s been jerking me around for the last year and a half, but I don’t want to give him some little nickname. It makes him seem more like a fictional character instead of a real human man who would fuck me every weekend, eat all my good cereal, then pretend like I didn’t exist whenever I saw him at the office.
“Whatever,” she says, sounding annoyed. “His name doesn’t matter. What he did was bullshit. He doesn’t get to be a person after that. Not to me.”
What hedidwas ghost me for two weeks, and when I finally cornered him in the break room at the office, he laughed in my face and told me all about how he’d proposed to his longtime girlfriend, and that meant it was time for him to quit screwing around with me.
There had been alookin his eyes too. A challenge, almost begging me to tell him that I thought we were more just so he could humiliate me.
I knew John liked to degrade clients who thought they were too big for their britches, so I’d known he’d get off on it if I rose to the bait. Biting my tongue had been hard, my instinct to lash out strong, but I hadn’t wanted to give him the satisfaction.
I’d just shrugged and walked away, shutting down any and all feeling for the rest of the day until I got home. Falling on my bed, I’d screamed into a pillow until I lost my voice, texted Flor for emergency wine, and then spent the whole weekend staying day drunk to soothe my pride.
I hadn’t loved John. There’s no world in which I would love that man, but I couldn’t help the sting of being so callously used and rejected as though I meant nothing at all.
“Look, it’s going to be fun, okay?” Flor insists, dragging me out of my thoughts. “It’s in the mountains—”
“I hate the mountains,” I grumble, knowing she’ll pretend she can’t hear me.
“The rooms look really nice. Sage totally agrees, and you know he has good taste.” I can hear her sappy smile through the phone. Sage is her annoyingly adoring husband, and they’re newlyweds, so they’re still in that disgusting phase of being all over each other. I’m not sure I can take seeing them so happy right now though. “And there are horses! I booked us their two-hour trail ride.”
“Oh my god, Flor.No. Do you know what will happen if you put me on a horse?” I ask in a tone that is far too calm for how I’m feeling.
“The same thing that happens to everyone?” Flor says. I can all but see her smile—that smirk that’s trying to look sweet but isn’t at all. “You’ll bruise your ass and get really cold because even in summer, it’s chilly up in the mountains. Then you’ll want a two-hour massage when it’s over, which is the best excuse for a spa day.”
“No. See, that’s what’s going to happen toyou,” I counter. “I, on the other hand—”
She scoffs, interrupting the end of my sentence. “I’ve been horseback riding since I was five. I haven’t had a bruised ass since I was a preteen. And I don’t need an excuse for a spa day.”
Yeah, not exactly what I was getting at. “Listen, Flor…”
“No,youlisten,” she fires back. If a stranger heard the way she spoke to me, they’d think she was an epic bitch. She’s never been good at moderating her tone or curbing her emotions when she was feeling passionate. Normally, I just brush it off, but I know what she’s going to say and can feel myself getting defensive. “That asshole hurt you, and your job has been working you into an early grave, like your sole purpose is to pick up everyone’s slack.”
I sag back into my couch, losing all my steam. She isn’t wrong there, and Iamfeeling the burnout. Hard. “Yeah, well—”
“Andyour parents haven’t bothered calling to see how you are in what—eight months? Nine?”
I close my eyes and throw an arm over my face, doing my damnedest to keep my voice even. “No surprise there.”
My parents and I have never been close, but when I figured out I wasn’t biologically theirs, they hadn’t known how to handle it. I started asking the hard questions when the DNA test proved I was adopted, and it was like each word built a wall between us.
