18 #3
I looked between them, rain slipping down my temples, my heart sore from Easton, my girls, myself, and every version of me I had been trying to keep alive at once. “I don’t know what to do now.”
Bliss brushed one wet braid over my shoulder. “Tonight? You come home.”
“I don’t know if I can be alone in my room right now. I’ll emotion-text or do something worse than drunk texting.”
“Then come to mine,” Charm said.
Bliss looked at her. “Your bed is decorative and terrifying.”
“It is expensive and emotionally supportive.”
“It has fourteen pillows.”
“Sixteen.”
“That is not a bed. That’s a fabric obstacle course.”
Charm lifted her chin. “Aura can have the center.”
I wiped at my face. “I’m not sleeping in Charm’s pillow museum.”
“Then you come to Cade’s,” Bliss said. “He won’t ask questions.”
I gave her a look.
“He won’t ask many questions,” she amended. “And if he does, I’ll sit on him.”
“That sounds like foreplay.”
“Aura,” Bliss said, scandalized and proud at the same time.
Charm sighed. “I missed you so much.”
That almost took me out again.
I reached for both of them, grabbing their sleeves like they might vanish if I didn’t hold on. “I missed you too.”
Bliss’s face crumpled. “Never go days without talking to me again. I’m not built for it. I started reorganizing Cade’s kitchen by emotional category.”
Charm frowned. “What does that mean?”
“Protein powder was shame. Pasta was denial. Peanut butter was hope.”
“Where did you put the coffee?” I asked.
“Trauma.”
Charm nodded. “Reasonable.”
I laughed hard enough that it tipped into crying, and Bliss pulled me back into her arms with a soft, bossy noise.
“Okay,” she murmured into my hair. “Okay, we’ve got you.”
I closed my eyes.
My phone buzzed in Charm’s hand, and all three of us looked down at it. Bliss reached for it before I could and checked the screen.
Her expression changed.
I went cold. “Easton?”
“No.” She turned the phone toward me. “Cade.”
The message preview glowed against the dark screen.
Cade: Is she with you?
Bliss typed back that I was with them and that no boys were coming that night, adding that she had my phone so Cade wouldn’t mistake the message for mine.
Three dots appeared almost immediately.
Cade: Understood, pip. Tell her I’m sorry.
My chest tightened in a different way.
Bliss looked up at me. “He means it.”
“I know.”
Charm took the phone gently from Bliss and passed it to me. “You don’t have to answer.”
I looked at Cade’s name and the apology from the man who had been Easton’s friend first but still understood enough to be sorry for the room. I typed out a thank-you and an apology of my own, but my thumb stalled above the send button.
“Not tonight,” I said.
Bliss took the phone gently from my hand. “Not tonight.”
Charm hooked her arm through mine and started steering me toward the SUV. “We’re leaving your car here.”
“My car is offended.”
“Your car watched you cry for twenty minutes and did nothing. It deserves consequences.”
Bliss grabbed my purse and keys, then locked my car with a decisive click. “We’ll get it tomorrow.”
I looked back at Easton’s building before I could stop myself.
The flickering security light buzzed over the entrance. Rain slid down the brick. Somewhere inside, Easton was alone with his split knuckles, cheap apartment, and every truth I had finally given him too late.
My chest pulled toward him so hard it felt physical.
Charm’s arm tightened around mine. “Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were thinking loudly.”
Bliss came up on my other side. “He needs to sit with it. So do you.”
“I hate when everyone is emotionally reasonable around me.”
“That’s rich from the woman who called us friendship court,” Charm said.
“I was under duress.”
“You were wearing lip gloss and rage,” Bliss said. “That is not duress. That is Tuesday.”
I let them pull me away from my car, away from the building, away from the man I loved and could not fix with one confession inside a dark apartment.
Charm opened the back door of the SUV, and Bliss climbed in first, patting the seat beside her like I was a skittish cat she had lured out from beneath furniture.
I slid in beside her.
Charm paused outside the door and looked at me. “You good if I drive?”
“No, but apparently that’s not tonight’s standard.”
“Excellent.” She shut us inside and climbed into the driver’s seat.
Bliss tucked herself against my side while Charm started the SUV and turned the heat up high enough to fog the windows.
I covered my face with both hands, and for the first time all night, the sound that escaped me was almost a real laugh.
Bliss pulled my hands down and kissed my knuckles. “There she is.”
I narrowed my wet, swollen eyes at her. “Do not say that like you discovered me in a cave.”
Charm looked at us through the rearview mirror. “We did discover you in a parking lot.”
“Barely civilized,” Bliss added.
“Emotionally rabid,” Charm said.
“Still ours,” Bliss finished.
I looked at them both, at the tear tracks on Bliss’s face and the rain in Charm’s hair, at the girls who had hurt me and come back, at the girls I had hurt and still needed, and something inside me loosened just enough to let air in.
“Still yours,” I whispered.
They both held on tighter.