Slinking down in the booth to avoid the sudden attention, I glance at Masters. “Good thing she didn’t react.”
“Really kept calm,” he agrees, eyes crinkling. “Cool as a cucumber.”
Harper’s hands are pressed against her temples. “How in the mother-effing HELL did you keep this from me?Whydid you keep this from me?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I drawl. “Maybe because I knew you’d react likethis.”
Her cheeks are flushed red. She sits in total silence, processing my words, then flags down the first waitress she sees walking by.
“Hi, yeah, I’m going to need another one of these.” She lifts her appletini. “But this time, can you use alcohol? In fact, lose the apple. I’ll just have a gin martini. Extra dry. Hold the olives. As fast as you can manage, and keep them coming. Thanks.”
The waitress gives a startled nod and disappears.
Harper turns back to me. “Okay. Now that I’ve handled…that…” She shakes her head, still in shock. “Start at the beginning. I want to hear exactly what happened.”
I take another sip of my fake cocktail, wishing more than ever that it was alcoholic, and begin my tale of woe.
“It was the night of the cast party…”
The sushi sits untouched between us as I walk her through the night.
Talking to Wyatt in the gazebo. Going upstairs to say goodbye to him. Walking down the hallway. Finding his bedroom. Seeing his silhouette on the edge of the bed. Taking off my dress. Letting him wreck me.
“Holy shit,” Harper breathes, squirming a little as I describe him touching me. Even Masters, the epitome of composure, is looking a little red around the collar as I recall the way Wyatt’s big hands gathered my wrists and pinned them to the bedsheets.
“That’s so sexy.” Harper sighs, but I can see her excitement is tempered by trepidation. There’s already sadness in her eyes — that same foreboding that settles over you when you’re reading Romeo and Juliet, wanting to root for the characters but knowing full-well that things are about to turn to shit. She sees the ending to this story will not be a happy one, no matter how much she hopes otherwise.
I somehow keep my voice from shaking as I recount waking in tangled sheets, totally alone. Deciding he regretted our rash, drunken fervor. Descending the staircase. Being confronted at the door with cool words and smashed plates and crumbling hopes. A ruined breakfast-in-bed, leaking across a tile floor.
Harper’s eyes fill with tears.
And I find, when I reach this point in my story, that my composure cracks open like a fault line in the earth and I cannot go on. Cannot describe the rending heartbreak that scorched through me in those desperate moments, after Wyatt walked away, while I rode home in the back seat of a car service, barely able to articulate my own address to the driver.
“Oh, honey.” Harper’s hand finds mine, squeezing tightly. “Honey…”
I look away. Anywhere but into her eyes, because I can’t bear to read the secondary heartbreak buried there. As all true best friends do, she adopts my emotions as her own, feels my heartbreak as hers. I can sense words poised on the tip of her tongue — useless things she wants to say to make me feel better, but can’t because they simply aren’t true. Things likeit’ll be okayandit’s not that bad.
We both know it won’t be okay.
We both know it trulyisthat bad.
“Well,” she says after a while, for lack of anything better to say. “I guess that explains why he hasn’t been calling me back.”
I try out a smile. It wavers weakly on my lips, then falls away.
Her eyebrows pull together as she sips her martini. “So… today, when you saw him again….?”
I tell her about Caroline. Her frown deepens.
“Whoever she is, she won’t last,” Harper announces, wielding her chopsticks like weapons as she selects a piece of sushi from the board between us. “ThisCarolinegirl is just…” She gestures vaguely. “An ego Band-Aid.”
“Come again?” I scoff.
“A rebound. A safety screw. She’s the girl you fuck to get over the one you love.” Harper pops the sushi roll into her mouth and moans. “Damn, that’s good.”
“Wyatt doesn’t love me.” My voice is flat. “Or, maybe he did, maybe hecould’ve, but he definitely doesn’t anymore.”
She rolls her eyes. “Uh huh.”