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And I’m alone with Timothy.
“You okay?” he asks, leaning back in the chair, legs stretched out in front of himself.
“Yeah, fine.”
“You sure? You’re a bit…squirrely since I went to get Mina. What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
“Is it Jessie?”
“No.” I say it way too quickly, way too loudly. My face goes warm, so I grab my glass and take a long drink to hide.
“Dude.” Timothy sighs, and here it is. He’s about to tell me he knows. I tip my glass back, ignoring the burn down my throat because this is it. The consequences of my bad decision.
My glass isn’t quite empty when I set it down. Timothy raises his and takes a long, drawn out drink. I swear he does this on purpose.
He sets his glass down, staring at it. “She doesn’t show it, but she’s sensitive. You can’t give her shit about her singing voice the night before Bawdy Caroling, or she won’t go all out. We’ve got to win this.”
Relief—and the straight shot of more alcohol to my system—makes me slump in my chair. He bought that story I told him to explain away Jessie’s freak-out.
I need to finish off my drink so I can escape before he figures out what really happened.
Timothy looks back up at me. “She was staring so hard at your dick, I thought your pants would catch fire.”
I choke and Timothy bursts into laughter.
I’d noticed she’d been staring, but Timothy noticing? Not good.
“Maybe she hoped it’d fall off.” I suggest.
Actually, that was probably it, and she’s been messing with me all night because she’s upset she got caught.
“Didn’t work.” I add, glancing at my groin and getting to my feet with a half-hearted shrug. “I’m going to bed.”
“Sit down,” Timothy says sharply, all laughter gone. “We need to talk.”
Shit. He doesn’t get serious often. “I’ll apologize about the caroling in the morning.” I’m clinging to my lie until he proves he knows what happened in the laundry room.
“This isn’t that. What did you say to Camden?”
I sink back into my seat. Images of a clean-cut, averagely handsome man float up from where I’ve buried all the shitty memories. “How am I supposed to remember what I said five years ago to some guy I met once? Besides, you were there the whole time.”
“Not the whole time,” he says in a quiet tone. “I went to bed. You two stayed up drinking.”
“I don’t remember.” It’s not entirely a lie. My memories are booze-soaked. I kept Camden drinking with me because the thought of him going upstairs made me ill. Camden brought Jessie up. I told him…
I groan. Pretty sure I told him I’d ruin their marriage. Not my finest moment, but I was drunk enough to think that I could. That Jessie was somehow mine, even though I’d been seeing Addison.
Timothy grips the rim of his glass, turning it slowly. “He broke up with her when they got back to New York.”
I found out a week before Christmas. Jessie was miserable when I saw her, and that misery rubbed off on me. “People break up.”
“He had a ring. He planned to ask her to marry him.”
The cannoli and Timothy’s whiskey roil around in my stomach, along with all the damn cookies, because I know that too. Camden told me.
“You said something to him, didn’t you?”
