Chapter Twenty-One
Hazel
The look in Reid’s eyes when I’d confessed I thought he would break my heart did the breaking even before he had the chance to. I could tell I’d hurt him, and that was never my intention when I went over there. But it hurt too much to let things keep building like they had been.
Especially after witnessing that client—who was ten times more attractive and probably a billion times more experienced than I was—shamelessly hitting on him after he was done working on her tattoo. And that was his reality. He was a handsome man who had women throwing themselves at him, and he didn’t need me doing the same thing.
Because they all ended up a fleeting memory to him, and I wasn’t sure I could sacrifice our already fragile friendship to know what it felt like to be with him. I couldn’t risk the chance of losing him for good. It was hard enough to know what he was like behind the mask he put on for others.
But I couldn’t take back what I’d said to him, because I knew things had already gone too far for me to keep my heart safe. It hurt to walk away from the possibility of more.
As I walked across the cold parking lot, I mustered up what was left of my courage and sent the text I’d been plotting in my head since last night.
Fourteen: If you don’t want to talk to me, please just tell me. I’m spiraling a bit today and I’m not sure if I should read into you not responding to my last text. And while you claimed you’d be crying into your beer, I’m not sure I can show my face at that reveal if you won’t be there.
Three dots danced across the screen, and my heart pounded as I punched in the code on the lock to the back door. Too busy staring at my phone, I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going and almost dropped it when I crashed into someone turning the corner toward the back staircase.
“You okay, Haz?” My best friend’s voice was concerned as she steadied me with her hands on my arms. I was sure my face was splotchy from my confrontation with Reid, but at least I’d managed not to completely break down in front of him.
“I’m fine,” I muttered, looking away from her scrutinizing gaze. She was lucky, her face didn’t give away all her emotions like mine did. And I was sure she wouldn’t be freaking out if she was in my position, almost paralyzed by two men showing an interest in her. If she wasn’t so obsessed with my brother, she would eat up the attention with a spoon.
“No, you’re not.” She cupped my elbow and steered me toward the staircase, following me to the top and closing the door to what used to be her apartment, too. I’d been so out of it last night and this morning and hadn’t cleaned up the rest of the aftermath of what had happened with Reid.
Not that there was much, just a pile of pillows on the floor next to the couch in disarray. Staring hard at them, I wondered which was the one I’d been kneeling on.
“Why are you looking at your pillows like they’ve offended you? I thought you loved those things.”
Turning away from Charley, I tried to keep the blush at bay, but she wasn’t my best friend because she was unobservant. “No reason.”
“Bullshit. Sit down and tell me why you are mean mugging a fucking floral throw pillow and moping around the bar like the world is ending.”
I drew in a deep breath, trying to calm my heart, but I knew there was no way I was getting her out of the apartment without confessing what was bothering me. She eyed me from her seat at the other end as I nudged the pillows away from me and sat down.
“What do you want to know?”
“What do you think I want to know, Haz? We don’t keep secrets from each other.”
Raising an eyebrow, I pinned her with a look, because while she had texted me she was running off with my brother on Halloween with his psycho ex on the loose in the bar creating havoc, she also hadn’t told me that her crush on him was more than just surface level.
There was no way she’d just fallen for him over the course of a single weekend and agreed to move in with him a couple of months later. That wasn’t how Charley worked. She rarely had a second date, so the fact that she was so enamored with my brother after a few days meant her feelings for him had been building for a while.
“You don’t want to know the secrets I keep about your brother, so don’t even pretend whatever is going on with you is the same. There’s a big difference between me not sharing details about my sex life and you keeping actual secrets about something that is clearly upsetting you enough you came in from wherever you were this morning crying.”
“I wasn’t crying.”
“And I’m the virgin on this couch,” she replied sarcastically.
“Okay. Maybe I was crying a little, but it wasn’t a big deal. I cry all the time. You know this. Sometimes I cry when I’m angry.”
“Then what are you angry about? Because as your best friend, you know I’m obligated to be equally angry if not angrier than you are about whatever it is you’re hiding from me on your behalf.”
And I knew if I told her to, Charley would march across that parking lot and beat my brother’s best friend for playing with my emotions, but when I looked back on the situation, I wasn’t sure he was the one who had done the hurting.
“I’m not angry. Just…conflicted. This week has been a lot and I’m all up in my feelings. ”
“Clearly. But you’re still evading the question.”
Glancing down at the phone in my hand, I swiped up to unlock the screen, my spirits deflating as I saw that while he’d once been typing, Seven hadn’t replied.
“I’m not sure this experiment is going to work out.”
She crossed her arms, her expression morphing into genuine concern. Charley may have pushed me into it, but I knew if I genuinely wanted to back out of it before the reveal, she’d let me. “How so?”
“Things with Seven were going great, and I was really looking forward to meeting him, but something changed in the last 24 hours and now I’m not sure I can go through with it.”
Charley growled under her breath, muttering something I couldn’t hear. “What did he do?”
“He didn’t do anything, not really, but it’s just this nagging feeling that he’s losing interest or something. He isn’t initiating conversations like he did previously, and then he’s left me on read several times. He’s probably just busy and I’m being paranoid. I’ve been so distracted working on my commissions with—” I trailed off, but judging by how her eyes widened, she’d heard my slip.
“Is that what you and Reid were really doing last Sunday? Working on one of your commissions?”
Closing my eyes, I tried to figure out what to tell her without revealing how embarrassed I was to have been taken in by his charm. She knew his reputation, and while I don’t think she would ever discourage me from rekindling my friendship with him, she would also warn me against letting anything else happen between us. Especially knowing that there was someone else because of the blind dating event.
“Maybe.”
“Hazel, what the fuck is going on with you?” Char didn’t sound angry, just a bit startled that I’d been keeping something from her. But she’d been so busy, and part of me knew I shouldn’t be doing what I’d been doing with Reid. I just hadn’t told her because I didn’t want her to tell me to stop .
“You’ve been busy, and he offered to help—”
“Oh, I’m sure he fucking did…” she muttered, looking pissed on my behalf. “Did he do something to make you this upset? I don’t care if he’s Hudson’s best friend, I’ll fucking rip off his balls if he hurt you.”
“He didn’t…” I whispered, recalling the look on his face right before I’d walked out of the break room. “But I may have hurt him.”
“Why don’t you just tell me what happened, and I’ll decide whose balls I need to injure.”
To her credit, Charley just waited while I word vomited everything that’d been happening over the last week with both men. The flirtatious behavior, the text messages, how things had escalated with Reid until what had happened the other night. How ashamed I felt the last 24 hours as I tried to reconcile my feelings.
“First of all, you should not feel ashamed about anything that happened. You aren’t dating anyone exclusively, and until that kind of commitment has been talked about, you don’t have to explain your behavior to anyone.”
“I know, but…”
“I wasn’t fucking finished,” she snapped, but then took a deep breath. “Sorry, got a little carried away there. Second, there are no rules for how this dating experiment is supposed to turn out. If you want to have naughty show and tell with Seven, then get it, girl. On the flip side, if you want to sort of blow your brother’s best friend because it felt good, then do that too. Seven knew going in that there was the possibility of you talking to other guys before the reveal. So, he can’t be upset if you followed through on that.”
“But I wasn’t talking to another guy who was part of the experiment, I was talking to Reid, who didn’t even participate.”
Something flickered across her expression, but it was gone before I could interpret it. “Whatever. Same thing. Seven knew you didn’t have any obligations to him, and he doesn’t get to have an opinion on you talking to another guy—regardless of if he was involved in the experiment. Speaking of…has anyone else been texting you? ”
“Like I could handle anyone else with Seven and Reid taking up all the available real estate in my brain.” Although now that I was thinking about it. Christian, the baseball player who I’d been talking to after the Halloween party, had been sending me texts this week. I hadn’t really thought anything about it because I’d been so distracted by other things, but…
“What’s that look about?” she asked, amusement clear in her expression.
“Well, there has been someone else texting me, but I kind of blew him off.”
“As long as you didn’t blow him like you—”
“Shut it!” I interrupted her before she said it, because even though it was through his boxer briefs, I had given Reid a very unconventional blow job. Figures that I couldn’t even give my first blow job like a normal person.
She mimed zipping her lips and reached down to snag one pillow off the floor, hugging it to her chest, but thankfully it wasn’t the same kind that I’d used the night before last. Because she would definitely want to know why I was prying a pillow out of her arms and throwing it out the window.
When I didn’t start talking right away, she made a rolling motion with her hand and gave me an impatient look. “Do tell. I shouldn’t have to pry it out of you.”
“You know that baseball player who I was talking to in the fall who things kind of fizzled out with? He started texting me, too.”
Charley laughed, but I still didn’t see why that was so funny.
“What? What is so amusing about this situation? I’d rather go back to being invisible. You know I don’t like this kind of attention.”
“Hate to break it to you, Haz, but you’ve never been invisible. Oblivious maybe, but definitely not invisible.”
“Whatever. How do I make it stop? I don’t like feeling like this.”
Her expression sobered, and she nodded, seeing that the last few weeks had essentially ripped me out of my little bubble of solitude. “What do you want? Do you want all of them to leave you alone? ”
Thinking about how each of them made me feel, I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted either. “No, not exactly.”
“Then you just let things unfold naturally. If Seven wants to pursue something with you, he’ll step up his game. No amount of freaking out is going to help the situation until you have an actual conversation with him face to face.”
I nodded, absorbing her words before she spoke again.
“And Christian?”
“I don’t know. He’s cute, and he was nice to talk to. He’d definitely be the safer choice if he really was interested and not just being friendly.”
“Doesn’t exactly sound like animal attraction going on there.”
“Well, animal attraction has only managed to complicate things more than I’m prepared to deal with, so…”
“So, you’re not planning to ride off into the sunset with Reid?” she asked, making me think of what it’d felt like to be on the back of his bike.
Being with him like that had felt right. Like I fit there. But it wasn’t the attraction part I was struggling with regarding Reid. It was the feelings part. Like I was developing actual feelings for him, and he was only showing how much he wanted the benefits portion of our rekindled friendship.
“I don’t think it really matters. It’d never work out, anyway. I’m me, and he’s Reid, it’s not like we’re even in the same league.”
Charley frowned, throwing the pillow in her hands at my face. I batted it away, but she was still giving me a look like I’d offended her.
“That’s bullshit. If anything, he’s not in your league if he doesn’t realize how fucking amazing you are. And if he really wants more, he needs to man the fuck up because he’s doing a shitty job of showing you how he feels about you.”
“Pretty sure his feelings are clear. He wants to add a benefits package to our friendship.”
She shook her head, not convinced. “I wouldn’t go jumping to any conclusions just yet. See how things work out with Seven once you see him in person and then go from there. Sometimes people can surprise you with how they really feel.”
“That’s pretty much what Reid told me before I left his place.”
“Then maybe there’s hope for him yet,” she mused, standing up from the couch. “Now let’s go pick out what you’re going to wear on Valentine’s Day, because no matter who you end up with at the end of the night, you need to make every guy in that room regret passing on the opportunity to have your undivided attention.”