CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Jelly
I was sitting on my new couch with Nia. We were deep into our second bottle of wine and watching some shitty rom-com on Netflix.
I was still trying my best not to cry, but it was hard.
At least with Nia I didn’t have to hide who I was.
Even with Nadine I’d always tried to be the strong friend because I’d felt like she always needed me to be that for her.
But Nia was a straight up badass. She was tough all on her own. She didn’t need me to be anything other than who I was, so of all my friends? She was the only one I really felt able to cry around.
And I’d cried a lot over the past couple of days.
After I’d left Paolo’s parents’ horrible dinner, I’d stayed up late, assuming that he’d come and see me. He almost always slept over. But he didn’t come that night. Oh, he texted soon after I left, checking to see that I was alright. But when I didn’t text him back? He’d let it go.
I didn’t see him the next day, either. And all I could picture was him shacked up with Gia Santoro. Then when I’d gotten a text from Nia with a screenshot from Gia Santoro’s Instagram page, I knew. It was a selfie of her and a laughing Paolo out at the rooftop bar at Bahia Del Sol.
He’d gone out with her after I’d left feeling bad. It seemed Paolo didn’t care about me much at all. I’d put my phone down and tried to hold back the tears. He wasn’t worth them. I’d thought he was. But he wasn’t.
I had sat on a bar stool at my kitchen island and looked out the window at the bay far below.
There was no reason I needed to be here any longer.
I had less than two weeks left of the contract.
I already had the keys to my new place. It was furnished and ready for me to move in.
I had my car. The money from the auction was in my account.
There was no reason for me to stay. I’d called Carmen and told her what was going on. Somehow, she’d already heard.
She’d called in the troops, and I was moved in and unpacked in my house within a couple of hours. And Nia had opted to stay with me for a few days to help me get settled in. I knew they were worried about me.
And when Carmen had given me a hug and told me to hang in there? Well, that freaked me right the hell out. Carmen was less of a hugger than I was. “God, y’all. I’m not going to head down to City Bridge and throw myself in the water or something. I just got my heart broken. But I’ll be okay.”
They hadn’t looked sure, but they’d backed off a bit.
Thank goodness. “I’m going to get more wine,” I said, even though I knew neither of us needed even one more drop. Carmen had left a case of the good stuff for us, though, so we might as well take advantage of it.
“Sounds good,” Nia said, leaning her head back on the couch. “Maybe we should switch this up to a murder show. Or true crime. What do you think?”
The doorbell rang and Nia had to stifle a scream. “Oh my God, maybe not.”
I looked at my phone. It was almost one in the morning. Nia and I exchanged a look. After the serial killer who’d been on the loose in West Bay and what happened to Daisy, we were extra careful.
“Look at your doorbell camera,” Nia hissed.
“I haven’t set it up in the app yet.” I whispered, creeping to the door. I looked out the peephole and breathed a sigh of relief. Then got instantly angry again. “It’s fucking Paolo.”
Nia jumped up. “Let me answer it.”
I stepped aside.
She whipped the door open.
“Jesus!” he yelped, and I had to cover my mouth to keep from laughing.
“What the hell do you want?”
I could see him through the crack in the door. He gaped at her. “I want Jelly. Is she here?”
“You can’t have her.” She slammed the door in his face. “Boom, bitch!” she cried, doing a little dance, and a weird hand motion.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m dropping a microphone. You know? A mic drop?”
“I don’t think you’re doing that right.”
“Is that really what you want to focus on right now?” She rolled her pretty blue-green eyes.
“No.” I started dancing around with her doing the same wrong hand motion for a mic drop.
He rang the doorbell again. “I can hear y’all in there, you know.”
I made a face.
Nia yelled, “She doesn’t want to talk to you!”
“Well, I’m not leaving until she does,” he yelled right back.
“We should call your sheriff,” I hissed out.
“He’s not my sheriff, but yeah.”
“I can still hear y’all. Please don’t call the cops, and he totally is your sheriff. Also, I’m not going away, so I hope your new neighbors still like you after this. I’m going to keep talking to you through the door.”
Well, that wasn’t the way I wanted to make an impression in my new neighborhood. “Ugh. Fine. I’ll just talk to him.”
“Are you sure?” Nia looked ready to attack him for me.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Well, I’m going to give you guys some space, but holler if you need me.” She walked back to her bedroom. Or at least I thought she had. When I opened the front door, she came bounding back out and gave Paolo a strange hand gesture. Then she stomped off, still giving him mean looks.
“What was that she did?”
I sighed. “I think she was trying to do this.” I pointed at my eyes with two fingers and then pointed at him with the same two fingers in the classic ‘I’m watching you’ gesture.
He made a face. “Are you sure? Because that didn’t look anything like it…”
“That’s what I was trying to do,” she yelled from her bedroom.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Can I come in?”
I rolled my eyes but stepped to the side, letting him in. “That’s mainly because I don’t want my neighbors to hate me. Just FYI.”
He nodded. “Of course.” He walked over to me and planted a kiss on the top of my head.
“Hey,” I said, unable to look at him or pretend as if everything was fine.
“What’s wrong? Why did you move out?”
I glanced at him and ignored the question. “Where’ve you been?”
“Work.”
“But what about the night of your parents’ dinner party? Where’d you go when it was over?”
Did I imagine the flash of guilt that went through his eyes?
“You weren’t feeling good and didn’t answer your texts. I assumed you went home and went to bed.”
“Where did you sleep?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Did you sleep with Gia Santoro?”
“No,” he sounded horrified. “Why would I do that?”
“She made it pretty clear that’s happened before.”
“But not while I was with you, baby.” He ran his hand through his hair. “And I’ve never slept with her; it was just a blow…”
“So, where did you go after the dinner party?” Would he tell me the truth? Would he think I didn’t know?
“I went back to my place.” He turned away from me when he said it, taking that moment to take his tie off and drape it over the back of a chair.
“Really?”
“Yes,” he laughed and came over to rest his hands on my shoulders. Before he could start the massage I knew he was going to give me, I stood up and pulled away from him. I turned to face him.
He looked surprised. “Would you please tell me what’s wrong?”
“So, you went back to your place and nowhere else?”
“Yes, Jelly. My God. What is this all about?” He had the nerve to sound irritated, though I swear I could see the nerves on his face. He knew exactly what this was about.
I held up my phone with the picture of him and Gia looking very cozy at the bar. “It’s about that.”
His face fell and he went a little pale. I saw him swallow hard. “Well, I mean, yeah, I took Gia out for a drink or two. It seemed like it would’ve been rude not to.”
“Rude?”
“Yes, rude. I mean, she came all the way from Italy to see me. The least I could do was take her out for drinks.”
“Right.” I looked down, not knowing how to bring up the fact that I’d overheard what he said about me.
He lifted my chin up, forcing me to look in his eyes. “What’s this all about? Just that? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken her out without you with us.”
“I heard you,” I whispered.
He frowned. “What?”
“That night. At the dinner party. When I was coming back from the restroom, I heard all of you talking about me.”
The remaining color drained from his face. “Oh, fuck. Fuck! I didn’t mean any of that shit. I was just saying whatever I needed to in order to keep the peace.”
“What you said was that I was beautiful and fun to pass the time with, you had no intention of ever really being with me, I was no comparison to Gia, and that you, of course, had no complaints about her in the bedroom.” I lifted an eyebrow when he seemed like he was going to try and contradict what I’d heard.
“And then there were all the things your parents, Gia, and Gia’s mother said about me that you didn’t say anything at all about.
You didn’t defend anything about me. Nothing.
And they said some pretty horrible things. ”
He stood there looking desperately like he wanted to defend himself, but he knew he was in the wrong. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said those things. I didn’t mean them. And I should’ve defended you.”
“Next you’ll say that you should have come home and checked on me or tried harder to text me or that you shouldn’t have taken a woman you’ve obviously slept with out for drinks after I went home by myself from your parents’ dinner party that I didn’t even want to go to!”
“Shit.” He ran his hand through his hair. “It sounds horrible when you put it like that.”
“No, Paolo. It just sounds horrible because it was.”
It was then that I got another text. This one was from Carmen. I sucked in my breath when I saw the picture she’d sent to me. It was of him and Gia dancing at Salazar Nights. She’d written the word ‘tonight’ on it, and that was it.
“What’s going on?”
I turned my phone to face him again.
He closed his eyes and leaned against the back of my couch. He looked defeated.
“I don’t want to do the last two weeks of the contract with you. It’s less than that now, really. But after all of that? I’d… well, I’d rather not ever see you again.”
“Come on. Don’t you think you’re being a little dramatic? I told you, I didn’t even sleep with Gia.”
I gave him a look.
“I swear! I didn’t fuck her.”
“Wow. You deserve a medal.”
He rolled his lips inward. “I probably deserved that.”
“Oh, you definitely deserved that,” I said, hands on my hips. “I just need to know one thing. Are you going to make trouble for me with Carmen for not finishing the contract?”
He rubbed a hand over his jaw, thinking about it. “You won’t reconsider?”
“Why would I?”
He closed his eyes for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said, opening them and looking down at me. “I just thought we had something. I thought we were going to try to date when the contract was over.”
“Yeah. I did, too. But then I heard how you really felt about me. And I saw how concerned you were for me when you went drinking and dancing with your… new girlfriend, I guess? Then I realized that the only person who really wanted us to date after the contract was over was me.”
“She’s not my new girlfriend…”
“I don’t care. Fuck her all you want to now. We’re done.”
He flinched. “I won’t complain to Carmen. You’ll still get everything from the contract.”
“Thank you. I really do thank you for that.” I looked up into those beautiful gray eyes one last time. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to leave.”
“So, this is it then?”
I nodded. I really wanted to give him his bracelet back. But I loved it so much, and it was a symbol of what I’d thought we had together. So, I felt bad about it, but I was keeping it.
He opened up his arms. “One last hug?”
I wanted to hug him so badly. But I was afraid once his strong arms wrapped around me and I inhaled his woodsy scent, I’d be a goner. We’d tumble back into bed, and he’d keep me there for the next week and a half. No. I had to be strong.
I shook my head, tears forming in my eyes. “I don’t think so.”
He looked crushed but nodded. “I understand. I’m sorry I was an asshole.”
“Thanks.”