Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 125962 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125962 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
As much as I was tempted to go and meet him again, desperate to feel him again, I held off. Not because of the commitment I’d made to Pete ... that was feeling more and more fragile lately. No, because of the commitment I’d made to myself.
So instead of going to Bella, I did the safe thing. I went out and got drunk with my best friend.
“I cheated on Pete,” I blurted over the rim of my Old Fashioned.
Jessica, who had just taken a sip of her rosé, started choking noisily. Everyone in the bar looked around in concern. I waved them off, leaning forward to pat her on the back. She was prone to dramatics, though I guessed I should let her have this one. I hadn’t planned on telling her, but the booze had loosened my tongue. I had many secrets from my friends, but I couldn’t hold this one in. Couldn’t hold him in. He needed to exist outside of my mind, my memories. Maybe then he wouldn’t hold so much power over me.
Once she recovered, she did not speak to me, she turned to Aiden, the bartender at our favorite bar who also happened to be in love with Jessica. He had moved close, his dark brows furrowed in concern.
“We need two more of these,” she croaked out. “And a bottle of champagne.”
Aiden, used to Jessica and ready to do anything to make her fall madly in love with him, nodded once and said, “right away, darlin” in his very attractive Southern twang.
Now Jessica turned to me, unaffected by the twang, the ‘darlin’, and the puppy dog twinkle in a very attractive man’s eyes, as she had been since they met.
“Champagne?” I repeated, screwing my nose up ever so slightly. I would drink wine in a pinch but was more of a hard liquor kind of gal.
“Oh, can you please be a girl for once, and be excited about a bubbly drink,” she scolded. “We’re celebrating.”
“Celebrating me cheating on Pete?” I clarified.
“Fuck yes!” she replied, draining her drink. I was impressed at her willingness to go back to drinking so quickly after the aforementioned drink almost killed her. But Eli was at his dad’s for the night, and she was not fucking around. My friend was a great mother but had become one young, and because Eli’s father was mostly a piece of shit, she carried most of the weight of parenthood. When we went out, we went all out. Not to a club or anything insane like that, we had no interest in paying for overpriced drinks, wearing uncomfortable heels, shoving past people and shouting at each other. That was our early twenties.
We were in our early thirties and much preferred getting wasted in our familiar bar.
“Normally, especially given my past, I would not be celebrating infidelity, but this is a special case,” Jessica continued, slamming her wineglass on the bar.
“I’m going to have to start giving you plastic glasses, darlin’,” Aiden joked, looking at Jessica with a twinkle in his eyes.
She frowned at him. “I’ve broken like two.”
“Twenty-eight,” he corrected.
She scowled. “You’re lying.” She turned to me. “He’s lying.”
I held my hands up in surrender. “I’m usually far too drunk to keep tally by the time we start breaking glasses.”
She turned back to Aiden who was setting the ice bucket and flutes in front of us with a playful warning in his eye. “This is not because of any kind of inebriation, it is out of happiness. Sienna cheated on Pete.”
“Jess,” I hissed. Though I wasn’t feeling the shame a normal, well-adjusted person might feel about cheating on their fiancé, I really didn’t want my best friend announcing it to everyone with such ... glee.
Aiden did not look the least bit disgusted in me. In fact, his full mouth turned upward, showing a perfect set of white teeth.
“Well, congratulations, darlin’. This bottle is on me,” he said.
“As if our money is any good here,” Jessica scoffed.
Though neither of us took anything for free, after all the years we’d drunk here, and because we were friends with Aiden, we drank wholesale.
I held up my hand. “Now with her, I can understand the reaction because she’s ... almost definitely clinically insane.”
Jessica was too busy pouring our champagne to pretend to be offended.
“But you,” I continued, pointing to Aiden’s broad chest, “are most definitely more well-adjusted and, more importantly, sober. So I would assume you’d be a little less enthusiastic about me betraying your fellow man.”
Aiden’s smile disappeared. “Wouldn’t call Pete a man, sweetheart,” he replied, not unkindly.
I screwed my face up, looking between the two of them, the only true friends I really had. “You both don’t like Pete?” I finally asked.
Jessica let out a big sigh. “Fuck no! We hate Pete.”
Aiden frowned at her. “We don’t hate him, we just—”