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I smirk. “And what is so stressful about your life, Bran? The dry cleaner mess up one of your suits? The cleaning lady miss a spot of dust?”
He swallows hard, just now acknowledging the hostility in my voice. But he’s still not deterred.
“Well, um, Ava, you might have read in the paper that I’m getting married?”
Oh my god. Really?
“What about it?” I ask. Was he going to invite me or something?
Actually, that would be fun, showing up with the guys.
He puts his hands on his hips and looks down for a moment.
“It’s like this, Ava. How do I know I’m doing the right thing? Angel is great and all, but what if there’s someone out there better for me?”
This is not happening.
I nod slowly. “I bet Angel would be really interested in knowing how committed you are to your relationship with her. Maybe I’ll just have to phone her up and let her know what a fucking asshole you are before she makes the mistake of a lifetime.”
Horror crosses his face, immediately followed by anger. “Wait a minute. You have a lot of nerve talking to me that way—”
“You have a lot of nerve talking to me at all. Why don’t you go fuck yourself, you jerk?”
I turn on my heel to get away from him as fast as I can, grinning from ear to ear, and feeling like I just won the lottery. He just highlighted in so many ways just how different I am now than a few months ago.
It feels good. So, so good.
As I get closer to Good Vibes, I see the guys waiting out front for me, ready to throw their support my way. Their faces brighten as I get closer, as does mine. When I kiss all three of them hello, Jasper ruffles my hair and Ethan sneaks a grab of my ass.
And Leo, dear, sweet Leo, sees the bounce in my step. “Hey, baby. How was the walk over from the office?”
I want to throw my arms around him and all the guys. But I have to get moving.
“The walk was… good. Actually, now that you ask, it was great.”
* * *
EPILOGUE
“Shoes off, everyone,”Glenda says, looking around the room like a protective momma. “Now, close your eyes, and take a deep breath.”
She kicks off our team meeting the way she always does, with a touch of eastern mysticism, before she hits us upside the head with the burdens of the corporate world. Her approach, taken with the best intentions, always strikes me as a weird bait-and-switch, where our meetings are initiated all touchy feely and kumbaya, but morph to our asses being handed to us for missing deadlines and committing other offenses to the magazine.
Not that I am paranoid or anything, at least not anymore. I know that Glenda is generally a kind and fair person, but there’s no doubt in my mind, or anyone’s for that matter, that Glisten is her favored child. It has and always will take priority over anything or anyone else.
Which is why I gave Glenda an out by offering to resign when she called me out on my duplicity. I wanted to make it easy on her, speed up the process, flame out knowing I did at least one thing right. No reason to drag out the inevitable.
And yet, for some inexplicable reason, she kept me on.
She said I’d ‘find a way through this mess,’ bless her. And she was right.
But it hasn’t been a journey without a fuck load of pain and anxiety.
I’ve never, not in my whole entire life, felt as exposed as the day the story on my first O hit the newsstands. Although, ‘hitting the newsstands’ is somewhat archaic, considering most people receive their subscriptions in their email inboxes before getting any sort of print copies. So I knew exactly when, down to the moment, my column would be read by hundreds of thousands of women—or mostly women, and the few guy-readers of Glisten.
Six a.m. on a Monday morning.
Needless to say, I barely slept the night before. I was back in my apartment, my sojourn to Steve and Cami’s short-lived after the London trip. Of course, I wasn’t alone in bed that night, with Ethan on one side of me, Leo on the other, and Jasper in his own. But that’s not what kept me up. Well, not the only thing, I should say.
