Kendall
THE START OF fall seemed to come out of nowhere, the summer heat gracefully giving way to the pleasantly brisk chill of the new season. I loved summer because I could wear shorts and crop tops, but I looked great in sweaters and boots too. Pros and cons.
Things in my life were going well. Benji and Josie’s baby would be coming any day now, and I was definitely entering the busy season with my work.
I’d hit my max limit of orders for my September pastry release within an hour of posting the announcement on my socials, and I’d gotten a handful of local order requests too, the most recent of which I was currently doing a small test batch of.
I’d pulled the brown sugar apple blondies out of the oven a few minutes earlier so they could cool, and the maple cream cheese frosting was ready in the mixing bowl.
I had my camera on and aimed down at the counter as I worked, even though it was just a little test batch to make sure the recipe I’d come up with worked well. I liked having random footage of things to use as clips and to keep my background visuals varied for posts that were more about the audio.
“Oh my god, that smells so good it’s going to make me hard,” Rhys groaned from the living room, where he was stretched out on my couch playing Animal Crossing.
I’d surprised him with his own Switch and copy of the game after noticing him staring at my island with awe and envy a few too many times.
I’d had to promise it was an early Christmas present to get him to accept it, but since he had, he’d been doing his dailies and slowly building the jock-centric utopia he’d been dreaming of.
It was so cute watching a guy like him get into such a cozy video game, especially when he’d informed me he’d barely played any games ever in his entire life.
We’d visited each others’ islands a few times already, and I already had plans in my head of what other games I could try to get him into with me.
“You better be careful with that,” I warned him lightly. “Pavlovian style boners from baked goods could be kind of dangerous in a public setting.”
“Lucky for me it only happens when you’re the one making it,” he responded, and I could hear the smirk in his deep voice. He was lounging around killing time before he’d head out to Underdogs and watch the football game with his friends, the guys he’d reconnected with after moving back.
I remembered most of them from high school, and I was pretty sure they only hadn’t bullied the crap out of me because Benji and I had been sort of off limits, as the brother and pseudo-brother of the ultra-popular Rhys Kensington.
I was glad he had friends he could go hang out with that could relate to him about stuff I wasn’t into, but I wondered how they’d react if they ever found out that he was bi. Or that he spent most nights in my bed.
As I sprinkled a tad more cinnamon into my frosting mixture, Rhys’ cellphone started vibrating on the coffee table. I watched as he reached out to pick it up. When he looked at the name on the screen, his whole body language shifted and he let out a frustrated growl.
“She’s calling me again.”
He didn’t need to specify who he meant, as I was pretty sure there was only one person the irritation in his voice could apply to. Plus, this had been happening more and more frequently lately. He didn’t pick up, but only a few seconds passed before she called again.
“Jay says she’s probably recording all the calls trying to get me to slip up and say something incriminating,” he said, referring to his lawyer.
“Incriminating?” I echoed. “What could you possibly say that could be incriminating? You haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Yeah,” he agreed flatly. “Being a shitty husband isn’t a crime. I don’t know, just something that makes me look bad so the judge can feel sorry for her, I guess.”
Shaking my head, I took in a deep breath through my nose, pointedly focusing on my frosting mixture.
Maybe he had been a shitty husband, at least a shitty version of what she’d wanted in a husband, but it wasn’t like he’d been alone in it.
And even if he had been, it didn’t excuse what she’d done to him, or how she was harassing him now.
I knew the terrible way it had all blown up had given him a serious aversion to marriage in the future, so technically their issues had spilled out onto me too.
I didn’t even want to think about how much emotional damage I was going to have to repair before he’d consider being my husband.
If he ever wanted to get remarried, that was.
It seemed unfair that I had to deal with the aftermath of their mutual inability to realize how incompatible they’d been for each other at the start, but… it was worth it. I’d endure anything if it meant I could be with him.
When the phone started to ring a third time I could feel my own irritation start to bubble over. Rhys seemed to agree, but before he could complain again, something occurred to me.
“Maybe you should turn the tables on her,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“You said you think she’s recording you and trying to get you to look bad. Well, you could do that to her too. She’s always snapping at you during these calls, right?”
“Yeah,” he answered, his brows drawing together.
“So put it on speaker,” I said, easing my little camera around to face him and gently tapping the red light on it that indicated it was recording. He grimaced a bit, presumably at the idea of talking to her again, but did as I’d suggested.
“Hello?”
“Finally you picked up. I didn’t think you were going to.” Her tone wasn’t quite as acerbic as I’d heard it in the past, immediately making me suspicious.
“What do you need, Hailey?” He asked briskly.
“I don’t need anything,” she said. “I’m trying to be nice and give you one last courtesy call as a warning.”
His pale eyes slid over to me, and all I could do was silently shrug.
“A warning about what?”
“I’ve been talking to my father, and he really doesn’t like the mental state that all this drawn out legal shit is putting me in. He’s starting to get pretty worried about my wellbeing.”
I didn’t know much about Hailey, since Rhys didn’t love rehashing too much about the last few years of his life.
I mostly just knew that she and Rhys had been terrible for each other, and that after a long time of them living together with no sexual or romantic inclination for each other, she’d gotten with someone else.
One other thing I knew was that her dad was a pretty important rich guy, and he’d actually owned the company Rhys had worked at and gotten fired from. To add insult to injury, the supervisor he’d gotten fired by was the guy who Hailey had been cheating on him with.
When Rhys didn’t verbally respond to what she’d said, she went on.
“And basically after talking to him about some of what you’ve put me through, he thinks it’s time to go ahead and end this. He happens to be in some of the same social circles as Judge Rosenthal, you know.”
“What I’ve put you through?” Rhys responded with a snort. “What exactly have I put you through?”
“The stress of dealing with your unreasonable demands is taking a toll on my health, and he agrees with me.”
“Splitting the shit we own down the middle is an unreasonable demand?”
“Yes, it is!” She snapped. “It’s unreasonable because I’m the one who spent my time and effort procuring things for our home. It’s not just about the money, you know.”
“Look, I don’t want any of your precious fucking art and you know that. I want my car, my clothes, and my power tools. And you don’t care about any of that stuff, you’re just trying to punish me by dragging this all out.”
“I think I’m owed a little compensation for dealing with you for five years, Rhys,” she retorted. “You don’t know what it was like trying to turn a backwoods hick like you into a decent, presentable person.”
I felt my mouth drop open at her words, not only because it was such a cruel thing to say to someone she must have loved at one point, but because the idea of anyone thinking of Rhys Kensington as a hick was blowing my little mind.
Then again, I supposed maybe even the star quarterback and prom king would seem like a hick to someone who wasn’t from a town like Cherryvale.
“Yeah, I’d rather be a fucking hick than someone like you,” he bit out. “You cheated on me when you could have just said you wanted to separate, and then had your new boyfriend fire me for no fucking reason.”
“Oh, get over it,” she spat out. “We were barely even together.”
I watched his eyes widen, and they darted back over to me, and then the camera next to me as my heart rate picked up a bit.
He’d told me she’d never actually verbally admitted to the affair, even though it was completely obvious what had happened.
I was pretty sure she’d avoided copping to it because obviously infidelity didn’t make you look too hot in divorce proceedings.
I could tell by the shock on his face that he’d noticed, too.
“Would have been nice for you to let me know about that,” he responded, and I could practically see the gears in his head working to try and determine what would be the best thing to say next. “You didn’t have to tell Graham to fire me, you know. I’d have quit and left on my own.”
“Oh, yeah right. We both know you’d have moped around my house until one of us died of old age if I hadn’t made sure you needed to go crawling back to Mommy and Daddy. I did you a favor.”
The next few moments of silence felt like an eternity, but finally Rhys seemed to recover, clearing his throat. I could tell he was so surprised by what had transpired that he wasn’t even mad about the awful stuff she was saying.
“Yeah, well, uh… Do whatever you need to,” he said. “I have to go.” He clicked the button to hang up, then let his arm drop limply to his side. Blinking a few times, he looked straight into the camera.
“Oh!” I realized, fiddling with it to stop the recording.
“Holy shit,” he said, and I snorted.