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“Oh, stop being so damn dramatic,” I told him, tossing my keys into the bowl on the entryway table and taking a step around him so the other girls could follow me in. “I’ll feed you in a second. You aren’t going to starve to death in the next five minutes.”
“Uh, babe. He’s not going to starve to death in the next fivemonths,” Sloane announced, staring dumbfounded at Tortellini.
I moved into the kitchen as the rest of my friends gathered in the living room. As I got the cat food out of the pantry and poured some into his bowl, I heard one of them whisper, “That has to be the fattest cat I’ve ever seen in all my life.”
“Hey!” I shot up, looking over the counter that separated my living room from my kitchen and planted my hands on my hips, an affronted frown puckering between my eyes. Meanwhile, Tortellini dove for his bowl like he was on death’s door and it held the cure. “Tortellini’s not fat. He’s just husky.”
Asher didn’t bother to cover her snort with a fake laugh or anything. “You named your cat Tortellini?”
I shrugged, suddenly feeling self-conscious about my plus-sized feline. The vet had even said he needed to go on a strict diet, but I was a sucker for those pained cries. The old guy liked his food as much as I did. Who was I to judge a fellow foodie? And besides, I thought it was kind of cute that he looked like a basketball when he sat down.
“Shut up,” I said on a pout. “It’s one of my favorite foods.”
“And it’s fitting.” Marin’s voice shook with barely-contained laughter. “He’s built just like an over-sized tortellini.”
I looked down at my cat to find he was none the wiser as he scarfed down his meal. “Don’t listen to them,” I cooed to him. “They’re assholes. There’s not a thing wrong with you.”
“Except the fact you can barely see his legs because his gut hangs past them.” I shot McKenna a death glare and flipped open the pastry box, grabbed the first item my fingers touched, which just so happened to be an old-fashioned glazed donut, and took a giant bite.
“All right.” Charlotte lifted her hands in the air, drawing everyone’s attention. “Enough about the monstrously fat cat—”
“Husky,” I said around a mouthful of sweetened and fried dough.
She cut her eyes at me before continuing. “We’re here for something a lot more important.”
“Yeah,” Delanie chimed in. “Stop dancing around it and trying to change the subject. You know why we’re all here, so start talking.”
“Ooh.” Hardin let out a laugh. “You’ve got sweet, fairy-tale-loving Delanie going all hardass on you and putting her foot down.”
“Well, I can’t help it,” Delanie explained, her excitement starting to show through, and I had a sneaking suspicion I knew where this was headed. “Alma’s always been so against relationships and marriage. Always claiming she’s going to be the one holdout out of all of us who willneverget married. She’s never once talked about being in any kind of serious relationship, so as far as we know, she never has been.”
She looked at me, her eyes dancing. “Then this man appears out of nowhere, and we see her have an actual reaction to him. In a way she never has before.”
I held my hand up to stop her before taking a heaping gulp of my coffee, burning my tongue in the process. This morning was turning out to be as big a disaster as the night before.
“I’m going to stop you right there. This isn’t going to end up being the fairy tale you’ve got building in your head.”
“Why is that?” McKenna asked.
I pulled in a breath, willing my heartbeat to slow back down to a normal level. After ten years, you’d have thought I’d be over the pain that man caused me, but this felt like picking a scab and reopening the wound all over again.
“Because Roan Blackwell is the reason I’ll never get married,” I admitted out loud for the first time in ten freaking years. “He was the love of my life, and I thought we were forever. Then he broke me in a way there is no chance of healing correctly. There will be no fairy tale for me because he destroyed my belief in them.”
A hush fell over the room, and my friends all stared at me in a way they never had before. A way I’d worked my ass off never to experience again. They watched me with pity and sadness. I’d had more than my fill of that shortly after Roan had ended us. It was one of the reasons I’d built that icy wall around me, why I’d created the mask of the vamp I was today. Because I never wanted to be looked at with pity ever again.
But there it was, in the eyes of the people I cared about the most.
And I fuckinghatedit.
Just another thing that asshole had done to me.
I was going to need alotmore pastries to get through this morning. “Come on,” I bemoaned. “Don’t look at me like that. The last thing I want is for you to feel sorry for me. That’s why I never told you in the first damn place.”
To my bewilderment, Marin sniffled and batted a tear from her cheek. “You think we feel sorry for you?” she asked in a hushed voice. “That we’re looking at you like we pity you because you had your heart broken?”
I couldn’t understand why she was so sad or why some of the other girls looked downright pissed. “Well... yeah.”
“She’s not upset about that, you, you, jack-faced butthole!” Sloane declared, her own eyes glassy. “She’s upset for the same reason we all are. Because you never once, in all the years we’ve known you, trusted us to tell us about your past.”
