Chapter Twenty #2
When I looked up again, all eyes were on me.
Shit.
“Here,” Grace said, sliding a coloring page of Idris Alba over to me along with a box of colored pencils. “I don’t craft, either, but I like to color attractive men sometimes. I have a Keanu Reeves coloring book if he’s more your style?”
She tore a page out of that one and handed it to me as I laughed. “Thanks. I… I didn’t even think about bringing anything.”
“Do you do any kind of crafting?” Livia asked, working on her necklace again. “I’m a lover of fine jewelry, but Maven roped us into working on her wedding, and I absolutely hated that shit.”
“She did. She protested until I hired a planner,” Maven confirmed.
“And you thanked me for it, didn’t you?” Livia tilted her wine glass to her lips, and then her eyes went wide. “Oh! We’re so rude. Someone pour Ariana a drink.”
Grace hopped up. “On it!” And then everyone was waiting for my answer.
“I’m not really a crafter,” I said. “But I love to read.”
“Ick, Jaxson loves to read. I don’t know how you guys do it,” Grace said, bringing me a glass of white wine. “Bores me to tears.”
“Yes, well, you don’t know how to sit still without some form of vivid entertainment for longer than two seconds,” Mia pointed out. “Hence why we’ve only recently managed to get you to stay in Tampa for more than a month at a time.”
“I’m still debating the trip to Italy next month,” Grace said.
“I’ll allow it only if you set a wedding date.” Maven arched a brow at her friend before turning her gaze to me. “What do you like to read?”
“Oh, lots of things. Anything, really,” I said, and the first easy smile bloomed on my lips.
I could talk about books all night.
“I’m a huge lover of classics. I have pretty much every book you can think of that your English teachers made you study. Hemingway, Bronte, Austen. I’m a pretty big nerd for fantasy. Tolkien changed my life when I was a kid.”
“You read The Lord of the Rings as a kid?!” Chloe asked in disbelief.
“Middle school,” I answered with a shrug. “It was a great escape from real life.”
The room quieted, the girls sharing looks like they wanted to know more about that little comment, but I brushed hurriedly past it.
“Memoirs are a guilty pleasure of mine, too. And historical fiction. Oh, and cozy mystery! I love a cozy mystery.”
“What about romance?” Maven asked with a waggle of her brows. “You read any spicy books?”
I flushed so hard the table erupted with laughs.
“That’s our answer, I think,” Livia teased. “Don’t be shy, my love. Trust me — nothing you’ve read is kinkier than what I’ve lived in real life.”
“No lies told there,” Grace said, tilting her beer toward Livia.
“Romance books are my favorite to read,” I said, a faint smile finding my lips.
“They get such a bad rep, I think. Literary snobs turn up their noses at the entire genre. But it’s the bestselling one there is — and it makes perfect sense.
We’re all looking for love, aren’t we? Whether we desire it from a partner or a parent or a sibling or a friend.
We all crave acceptance for who we are. We fantasize about not just being seen, but being chosen.
We wonder what it would be like for someone to look at us, with all our quirks and flaws, and think, ‘Yeah. That. I like that. I want that in my life.’” I shrugged.
“And with romance books, you get to experience that feeling of falling time and time again — the butterflies, the stomach flips, the longing, the heartbreak and pain — only to know you’ll be put together in the end.
It’s quite lovely, actually. No happy endings are guaranteed in real life, but with romance books, you know it’ll all turn out okay.
And it fills you with hope, doesn’t it? That maybe things will be okay for you in the end, too. ”
I’d picked up a colored pencil somewhere in my ramble, and I smiled as I colored in Idris Alba’s shirt. When no one said anything, I paused, looking up with my neck heating again.
“Okay, Miss Poetry,” Livia said with a curl of her lips. “Is this how you reveal that you write, too?”
“Oh God, me? Never,” I said on a laugh.
“Well, after that little spiel, you may want to consider it,” Chloe said. “As a teacher, I feel like I’m certified to speak on these things and you, my dear, have a gift.”
“She probably speaks so eloquently of love because she’s getting dicked down by the hot general manager,” Grace said, doing a little dance in her chair. “Big Boss Daddy Energy right there, ow owww.”
Everyone laughed.
I nearly puked.
Somehow, I managed a smile despite the urge to vomit. “He’s quite the man,” I answered carefully.
“Okay, but I have a question.” Maven shared a glance with Grace before she opened her mouth, shut it again, and then tapped the table with one long nail before asking, “How do you and Coach know each other really?”
The table went silent, all eyes on me.
Double shit.
“We went to college together,” I said.
“Well, we know that.” Maven waved me off. “But were you just classmates or friends or…?”
Again, everyone leaned in, and I felt my skin prickle at the back of my neck.
I wanted to trust them. I wanted to share with someone and talk about it, to have a safe space.
But were they safe?
What if they told Nathan?
If he found out Shane and I used to date and I didn’t tell him…
I shuddered, hands wrung together in my lap again as I stared at them.
“I…” I wet my lips before looking up at them. “If I tell you all, will you promise not to say a word to anyone? Not even your husbands or boyfriends or—”
“You can stop right there,” Livia said, holding up a finger. “What happens at girls’ night stays at girls’ night. We are a fortress, this crew. Trust me.”
“I mean, Maven was married to my brother when I asked her to keep my secret that I was shagging his best friend. And she did,” Grace pointed out. “Without question.”
“Circle of trust,” Mia promised.
And maybe it was stupid, maybe it was a little careless… but I believed them.
I wanted so badly to have someone to talk to about it all that I was willing to take the risk.
“Shane and I were a couple,” I said, and just admitting it out loud lifted a weight off my chest. “We… we were in love once.”
Again, I was greeted by silence, and when I looked up, the girls were all slack jawed.
Then, all at once, the table broke into chaos.
“Oh, my God!”
“Did she just call him Shane?!”
“Okay, we need all the details right now.”
“I knew he looked at you like a sad puppy dog who’d lost his human!”
“How long?! When?!”
And against all logic, I answered every question.
The girls listened. They swooned as I walked them through how we started dating.
They cursed and hit the table when I explained how we’d broken up — though I did leave out the finer details on that one.
And by the time I finished my story, I felt something I hadn’t in years, though I couldn’t quite place it.
“Thank you for sharing that with us,” Maven said when I’d finished. “It’s nice to know the background.”
“Do you think he still loves you?” Grace yelped when Livia flicked her arm. “What?!”
“She’s married, you dummy.”
“And?!”
I chuckled, focusing on where I was coloring. “No. Shane and I had… well, it was just young love.” The lie felt sour in my gut. “It’s in the past.”
“So you’re friends now?” Mia asked.
I sighed. “I wouldn’t say that, either.”
The girls quieted, but thankfully, Chloe must have realized how we were crossing into a territory I was uncomfortable with because she smiled and cleared her throat. “I want to hear more about Georgie.”
“Oh, yes! Tell us about your baby brother!” Grace said.
“I can’t believe you raised him,” Livia marveled, shaking her head. “I haven’t even survived one year of motherhood, but it’s the hardest job I’ve ever had. And I had a stint of doing root canals when I was in school.”
The girls chuckled, and I smiled, the conversation easy from there.
It was effortless to talk about my little brother, about how he felt like my son more than anything.
I loved telling them about how smart he was, how caring, how funny.
I promised them they’d get to meet him when he came to visit for Christmas, and then blessedly, the conversation moved away from me.
But I didn’t miss the way the girls watched me at different moments that night, the way their gazes lingered, thoughtful, like they could sense the things I didn’t say and the parts of myself I kept carefully tucked away.
I knew they were curious about my past, maybe even my present, but they didn’t push. They gave me space. They let me choose what to share and what not to.
And suddenly, with a clarity that made my chest tighten, I understood why Nathan had never liked me having friends.
It wasn’t just that people might see him more clearly, that they might notice the cracks in the polished version of him that he worked so hard to present.
It was that friends meant witnesses.
It meant voices outside his own.
It meant I might have someone to talk to besides him.
Without them, he was the only place my thoughts could go. He was the only version of reality I’d hear. There was nothing to challenge him, nothing to compete for my attention.
Anything that pulled me away from him had always felt like a threat.
And that was the part I hadn’t fully seen before.
If I had friends who were too close, someone else might notice that he wasn’t the Prince Charming everyone thought he was.
And worse—
I might notice it, too.