AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I said thank you.”
“Don't think you did, princess.”
“Stop calling me that,” she growls.
“Why?” I grin. “Hollywood royalty in her fancy clothes and her shitty perfume and a mansion in the fucking hills…I think it suits you just fine.”
“What's wrong with my perfume?” she asks, affronted. “It's Chanel.”
“That supposed to mean something to me, princess?”
“And I don't live in a mansion,” she grumbles. “Stop acting like you know me, Cole. You don't know anything.”
“Whose fault is that?” I reach out and twist a long strand of her hair patronizingly around my finger. “Wasn't me who fucked off in the middle of the night without telling anyone, remember?”
She bats my hand away and snarls. “You swear too much.”
“You evade too much.”
“You know what? I don't need this from you right now. I only came to thank you for the flowers, but now I wish you’d never sent them at all,” she huffs.
“Don’t be too flattered. Mama made me send them.” I laugh darkly as she turns and stomps out of the shop, the sound of her heels clicking across the concrete floor echoing around the room. “That's right, princess, run away. You're so fucking good at it.”
“Fuck you, Cole,” she yells over her shoulder and I keep laughing until the clicking of her high heels fades completely out of earshot.
Only then do I collapse onto the floor beside Stanley's car and tear at my hair with my hands.
Fuck this.
Fuck Thea and her Hollywood bullshit. Fuck her fancy dress and the strip of leg she left bare between the hem and the top of her boots. Fuck her for making me notice and for not wearing a coat again in the middle of winter. Fuck her for breaking my heart six years ago, for destroying me, for leaving me like I meant nothing.
But mostly, fuck her that, despite all that, to me she still means everything.
“Althea,if I can fake a relationship with a man I don't love, then so can you.”
My manager's voice crackles through the speaker in my rental car as I drive up the long, tree-lined driveway that winds up toward Pine Ridge Farm.
“Respectfully, Elena, our situations aren't comparable.” I sigh before reminding her, “That man was your husband, and you were only pretending to love him so he wouldn't catch wind of your online affair with a stranger and cut off your access to his credit card.”
“You make it sound so sordid.” She sighs. “It wasn't like that at all.”
“Wasn't it?”
“Trent is my soulmate. He just needs some time to process everything.”
Maybe we remember it differently, but I'm pretty sure she started talking to a stranger on the internet and one day declared that she'd met her soulmate. She fell head over ass for this guy she'd never met.
For months, I was forced to listen to her fawn over him and read the millions of screenshots she sent me of their midnight conversations. Once, she even sent me a video of her sobbing into the camera.
That was when she'd found out he had gotten married.
Not that it put an end to their relationship. And if I'd thought that his new marriage would dampen things, then clearly I'd been mistaken. In fact, I'm almost certain they were sexting on his wedding day as he sat beside his bride at the head table before leading her to the floor for their first dance as husband and wife.
Things escalated after that. Dirty texts became video calls, they started making plans to meet up in real life, and then, of course, came the melodramatic declarations of love.
Then, Elena filed for divorce from her husband, citing unreasonable behavior on his part. To my knowledge, he's still not aware of the real reason his wife left him—to pursue a man she'd never met, his own marriage be damned.
Predictably, those plans she made with Trent to have a secret weekend together in a cabin somewhere inevitably fell through. And I'm sure it comes as no surprise to anyone that Trent and his wife are still happily married.
