Page 143 of Holding On To Good

Reality: She was, at this very moment, still hoping. Wishing. Worse than either of those, she was still waiting.

Truth: She was an idiot.

And it was time for her to stop. Stop hoping and wishing. Stop waiting.

Stop wanting Reed Walsh.

It was time for her to go home.

Another sigh, this one longer and, yes, way more pitiful. She wasn’t going home to her big, comfy bed and warm, goofy dog. She was staying the night at Emory’s. Was Emory’s official DD and wing-woman tonight. A job she’d performed, she might add, excellently. Not only had she kept Emory from doing something stupid—like begging Kevin to take her back after he’d dumped her for Lauren Piganelli—but she’d also managed to stop Emory from storming over to them and ripping Lauren’s hair out of her head when they showed up, holding hands and smiling big.

There’d been a few tears—beer and crying were, after all, a package deal. Especially at high school parties. But Verity had soothed her BFF, made her laugh and then oh-so-gently nudged her to talk to Michael who’s had a crush on Emory since, like, seventh grade.

It’d taken less than half an hour before Emory had one hand on Michael’s butt, the other around his neck and her tongue in his mouth.

So, yeah. Give her a sticker and a pat on the back. Her job here was done.

She slid off the tailgate and walked around to the passenger side of the truck. Knocked on the steamed-up window. “Em?” she called. “You ready to go?”

Look, call her a cock-blocker or whatever but she was tired. She was bored. And for some insane reason, she felt like crying and she hadn’t had so much as a sip of alcohol.

Tears and boys were a package deal, too.

She was about to pound on the window yet again when the engine turned on. A moment later, the passenger side window slid down, the dim light of the dashboard revealing Emory in all her mussed, rebound glory—messy dark hair, shirt wrinkled and shoved up to just under her bra, cheeks flushed.

“Five more minutes,” Emory pleaded.

This, this was what she got for being the rational, responsible one in their friendship.

Her brothers’ fault. They’d done too good a job of raising her.

Michael leaned forward, one arm on the steering wheel, brown hair sticking up, his shirt gone. “Make it fifteen.”

Okay, first of all, she admittedly wasn’t exactly well-versed in the actual act of sex, but Emory and her other friends had told her enough stories about the boys they’d been with that even she knew Michael claiming he needed a whole fifteen minutes to do the deed to both their satisfaction was an unrealistic boast.

From what Verity had heard, two minutes was more the norm.

Secondly, there was no way she was going to sit on the tailgate, alone, in the dark while these two went at it. Sure, she could rejoin the party, but she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to talk to anyone and she was in no mood to have fun.

She wanted to leave.

No, what she wanted was to magically incur a very selective form of amnesia that would only make her forget the Reed Walsh parts of her life these past two weeks. Like the way he’d looked at her in DiFonzio’s garage, his gaze trailing slowly up her body, his eyes widening slightly in surprise, in appreciation and attraction, before his expression shuttered.

The way he’d been at Custard City after she’d talked to Brandon—slouching and scowling and ticked off, as if he hated the idea of her being with another boy.

The way she felt around him. Nervous and amped up and excited and scared, as if she was barreling toward something she was completely and utterly unprepared for.

She wanted to go to sleep and wake up with every Reed memory permanently erased.

Was that really too much to ask?

“I’m not feeling well,” Verity said, and yes, she realized she sounded snippy and whiny—not an easy combination to pull off but she managed—but it was the truth. Her stomach hurt. Her head ached. And she wasn’t even going to get started on what was going on with her heart. “I want to go now.”

“Oh,” Emory said, straightening her shirt, frowning in concern. “Yeah. Okay. I’m ready, I guess.”

Except that I guess tacked on at the end and the clear resignation in Emory’s tone, not to mention the wistful, lustful glances she kept shooting Michael’s way, told Verity she wasn’t all that keen to jump into Best Friend Mode, she was only going through the motions.

Verity so did not need this in her life right now.

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