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I didn’t lie. I don’t have a girlfriend. How can you give up someone who was never yours in the first place? Someone who insists she hates you. When each time you hear her say it, it only acts as another force pushing you to prove her wrong. To make her scream out your name in pleasure instead of hate.
And fuck I love the way she sounds when it’s my name she screams.
I knock back the rest of my drink, sliding my glass onto the table. Drew dutifully fills it up. He wants to get me wasted. He knows I need it. Drink first and blow off some steam, then hunker the shit down and fix it. It’s what we do. All of us. It’s why we’re all friends. Why we’re all successful at what we do. We don’t give up. We find a way. Like Dad always used to say before this knocked him on his ass.
The Riches always find a way.
“We’ll think of something.” Drew claps his hand on my back in a show of solidarity that has never wavered over years of friendship.
I look sideways at him as he drinks. He has no idea what I’ve been doing behind his back. What kind of friend am I? Here he is, trying to console me on what has to be one of the most epically shit days of my life bar the day he got shipped off to the juvenile detention center. And all this time, I’ve been banging his sister like I can’t fucking control myself.
Maybe because Ican’tfucking control myself around Maddy.
She’s right. I’m an asshole. And a shit friend. And now I’m going to be a shit son when I tell Dad I can’t marry Gabrielle. He’s going to lose everything he’s ever worked for. And so is Mum. She doesn’t deserve this.
I push my finger and thumb into my eye sockets as I hang my head. The guys are right. I need a drink tonight. Fuck, I need a whole bottle. Then tomorrow, I’ll start searching for ways to get out of this shit. Maybe I can talk to Spencer, reason with him. Ask Gabrielle to do the same. Fuck knows, but I have to do something. I can’t be responsible for people I care about losing everything. Not again. It’s a disease that will grow and poison everything. Look what it did to Maddy.
Maddy.
She blamed me for losing Drew. She hates me.She fucking hates me.She let me inside her body, while keeping me firmly out of her heart, walking away when we got back from Italy like she said she would.
And it hurt. Just like I told her it would. But it only hurt me. Not her.
“Rachel loves this song.” Tanner’s tired eyes light up.
“So does Rose,” Dax adds.
Drew looks at me, and I smirk. Yeah, no sympathy for either of them. The fuckers have it good and they know it.
Drew’s phone vibrates in his pocket, and he pulls it out. “Just got to take this.” He stands and heads toward the exit, lifting his phone to his ear.
I sit back and look at the quickly emptying whiskey bottle.
“Let’s get another,” I announce.
Chapter 24
Maddy
“MaybeIneedanew recorder as well as earbuds,” I groan into my margarita as Chloe listens to Nate’s voice for the millionth time with a dopey grin on her face.
“I think you need your ears tested. He sounds dreamy.”
I frown and stuff the recorder back into my purse.
“Heisdreamy. Insanely charming and good-looking in real life. Just like we knew he would be,” I huff as I lift my cocktail and take a sip. I barely register the sting of alcohol after four, no, five cocktails.
We’ve been to a couple of bars and have ended in a new nightclub in Chelsea. Any other night and I’d be excited by the caliber of good-looking men lining the bar, and the thrum of bodies swaying on the central dancefloor to the deep bass of the music. But tonight, I’m struggling to gather enough enthusiasm for anything. Even swallowing my cocktail seems like a chore.
Chloe reaches over and plucks my glass from my hand, sniffing at the yellowy green liquid before tasting it.
“What are you doing?”
“Just checking. And it’s as I suspected.” She hands my glass back and relaxes against the back of the nightclub booth.
“What is?” I ask, sensing she’s about to share one of her outlandish theories.
She has one on everything, from Area 51 secretly harboring alien life forms in cryo-pods to Henry Cavill actually being a cyborg—because no real man could ever be that perfect.
