Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 68500 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68500 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
“I love you, Felix,” I breathed against his neck.
He reached up and cupped the back of my head, then leaned toward the side so that he could press a kiss to my head.
“I love you, too, Poppet.”
We lay like that for what felt like a solid hour before my phone beeped, letting me know it was time for me to leave, or I might miss my flight.
“What are you going to do tonight?” I asked quietly, not wanting to get up.
He looked up at the ceiling, swallowing hard. “I guess I’ll take Tammy up on the offer for pizza since she’s in town.”
Tammy.
Ugh.
I’d heard a whole lot about that woman, though I’d never met her.
Honestly, when it came to Tammy Wilkes, I felt like a freakin’ saint.
Felix and Tammy texted all the time.
To the point that sometimes, it was the middle of the night, and she’d text. If she didn’t get a text back immediately, she’d call. If she didn’t get the call answered, then she’d start making travel arrangements to come down to us from wherever the hell it was she was travel nursing at.
Honestly, I counted myself lucky that she was traveling full-time right now as a nurse.
It meant that in the time I’d known Felix, I’d only had to compete with phone calls and text messages out the wazoo. I hadn’t had to meet her once, even though I’d talked to her plenty of times when I’d answered Felix’s phone.
She hadn’t struck me as a very nice person, and after the third such encounter with her over the phone, I’d made the choice to no longer try when it came to her.
“Oh,” I said softly.
He chuckled. “Don’t worry, Poppet. She’ll only be here for a week.”
That didn’t make me feel better.
In fact, knowing she was going to be here when I wasn’t—and wasn’t it just so convenient that she was coming when I was leaving—was like a burn to my soul.
“I’ll call you when I land, okay?” I asked as I pushed up to my feet beside his bed.
My apartment had been packed for days.
I’d been staying at his place for a while now, and seeing him lying there, shirtless in the bed we’d shared so many times, the very last thing I wanted to do was leave.
But alas, my sisters and Keene were counting on me.
It was time to go, whether I wanted to go or not.
“Yes,” he said as he threaded his fingers behind his head. “Are you sure you don’t want a ride to the airport?”
I was already shaking my head. “That’s a three-hour drive, Felix. I’m not going to have you drive it when there’s a shuttle that’ll take me straight there.”
He sighed. “Promise to call?”
I shouldered my bag, then walked around the bed so I could reach him.
Bending down, I placed a soft kiss to his lips and then pulled back to say, “I promise.”
CHAPTER 17
Sometimes the only thing that fixes a situation is saying ‘fuck you.’
-Val to Felix
VAL
“I promised I’d call,” I repeated.
Felix’s eyes, so hurt and confused, looked up and caught mine. “I don’t even know what to say.”
Because there was no good answer here. Either he agreed with me and he lost a friend. Or he agreed with her and lost me. Because there would be a decision made. There was no other choice.
“I think that you need to make a choice,” I admitted softly, feeling sick to my stomach at what I was about to say. “Her or me.”
I steeled my belly, waiting for the blow I just knew was about to come, and seeing no way to step out of the way of it.
He swallowed hard, and my heart utterly sank.
But his words didn’t match what I was ‘worst-case scenarioing’ in my head.
“It was never a choice, Poppet. I would’ve chosen you. I picked you from the moment that I met you. Tammy was never, ever going to compare to you,” he replied, eyes soft as melted butter.
My heart felt full at his words, and a sick sort of hope started to fill me up from the inside out. “So what do we do?”
Because there was no easy way to fix any of this.
Tammy had just stolen years of our lives together. And this was only what we knew. What else had she hidden from us?
“What we do now is block her number. Both of them,” he said. “As a start. And tomorrow, I need to go to human resources and have a talk with them. One, about our relationship, and what they think we should do about it since we’re not going to be hiding it. And two, about what they want to do about Tammy. Because I now refuse to work with her.”
I nodded miserably. “We need to talk about us. We need to figure out where we go from here.”