Page 28 of Her Filthy Mistake

“Asked?” Zoe snorts and leans forward. “She doesn’t ask. She demands. And Daisy doesn’t bat an eye. It drives me crazy. I hate seeing her pushed around, but she doesn’t even see it, or at least she doesn’t want to see it.”

“Hates to see friends taken advantage of.” I nod like I’m taking down notes.

“Excellent.” She grins as her eyes crinkle at the corners. “We’ve got this.”

“Alright, keep going.” I grab a wedge of the deli-style cranberry turkey sandwich off the platter and hand it to her. “Turkey and cranberries?”

“My favorite.” She snatches it away from me and bites into a corner. The way her eyes roll into her head brings me to my knees.

Yes, I know. “Is it?”

“Yes,” she says over her mouthful of the fruit. “Everything here is so good. I can’t believe they have such amazing chefs.” She shoves the sandwich toward my face. “I mean, look at this. It takes great skill to make a killer turkey sandwich.”

“Yes, it does.” I grab one for myself and dig in. I’ve missed her sharp sense of humor.

As she fills me in on Daisy’s life, she gives me snippets of her own. They’re both single. Daisy is retaking calculus, and Zoe is joining her as moral support. Who does that? Only someone who’s loyal to a fault. She wants her best friend to meet the man of her dreams, get banged until her eyes are crossed, and live happily ever after.

“And you?” I swallow hard. What in the fuck? I didn’t ask that, did I? Her face is red. Yes, I did, and I don’t want to know. What if there’s some guy she’s pining for back home? I don’t want to know.

Her eyes drop to her lap. “I’m not sure that’s in the cards for me.”

Get back to a safer topic. There’s no doubt her father gave her marching orders to stay away from me. And as much as I can’t stand the man, I don’t want to cause issues between them. So, I’ll stay away until I get the chance to speak with him and prove that I’m no longer the punk kid he thinks I am.

“Back to the test. The list gives us some ideas, but Elise made a big deal about the questions being randomly selected, so I don’t think it’ll strictly follow the list she gave us.” I shrug. “The test might not cover any of these questions.”

“It’s the best place to start.” She snatches the paper off the table and crinkles her nose. “So…. What’re you afraid of?”

“Spiders.”

“Bullshit.” She leans toward me and playfully cuffs my shoulder.

I snatch her hand without thinking and hold it inside my own. She feels perfect there. Small. Dainty. Her pulse thumps against my fingertips. “Fine, I’ll be serious. I’m afraid that one day I’ll wake up and realize I was a pussy and never did the things I wanted with my life.”

Her eyes never leave mine as the air in the room snaps with possibility. If I kissed her, would she let me? I swallow, and for the first time, I wish I had an excuse. If I was drunk, it wouldn’t matter. I could kiss her and take her to bed and have a built-in excuse if she wore up horrified of what she’d done. I was drunk. It was nothing. I wasn’t in control of myself. But I don’t lean on the bottle to get through life anymore.

She licks her lips. “What do you regret?”

I regret letting your dad bully me and not take what I wanted. “I regret all the years I wasted being aimless and trashed. I wasted a lot of time and got nowhere.”

“Do you miss the music?” My gut twists, and I blink. Shit. What’s wrong with me? She dislodges my hand from hers and cups my cheek. “You were an amazing talent, and I’ll never understand why someone didn’t pick you up. Why my dad didn’t pick you up.”

“Thank you.” The lump in my throat is so thick I can barely swallow over it. Until this second, I didn’t realize how much I missed it or how much I needed to hear her praise.

“Why did you stop?” Her thumb brushes over the stubble on my cheek. I snatch her hand, but instead of letting go, I kiss the back of it. The flash of desire in her eyes is like a medicine ball to my gut. We’re alone at a resort with no one to tell us we can’t be together. At least while we’re inside of these walls. I lean forward.

She tips her chin upward and narrows her eyes. “Why?”

“Why, what?”

“Why did you stop singing and writing songs?”

“Shit.” I drop her hand and launch off the sofa, pacing between my bedroom door and the coffee table. “I quit because I needed to get clean. I was wallowing in self-pity from the endless push to get somewhere but never actually achieving anything. I was dulling the pain.” Fuck. I rake a hand through my hair. The pull to drink is intense but not as vivid as it used to be.

“That’s understandable.”

“No, it isn’t.” I bite the words out with more intensity than I intended. She shrinks into the cushions, but I don’t stop. “I was weak and should’ve had the balls to take rejection like a man.”

“And you haven’t sung or written since you stopped?” She climbs off the sofa, and my eyes stray to her legs. They’re tan, long, and tempting. More tempting than the alcohol and drugs ever were.

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