Page 107 of Rent Free

If we were ever friends.

“Harsh, brother.” Sage fluttered her eyes at him. “I need my family. I’m a broken woman, don’t you know?”

“Broken woman?” Wendy put in. “That’s quite hilarious.”

“I am!” she snapped. “And why the fuck are you even talking to me? I thought that we were friends.”

“We were ‘friends’ that weren’t really friends,” Wendy said. “You know why I don’t like you. But if you need reminding, I don’t like how you treat your family. I don’t like how you get pleasure out of hurting your family. I don’t like that you play this weird game with people, making them think you’re this helpless doll that needs saving. If they only knew you were a psychopath, they might not fall for your crap.”

“Still not cursing, I see. Same ol’ Wendy.” She came merrily down the steps of Wendy and Everest’s house.

She walked right up to Everest, patted him on the chest, and said, “You know, I needed you in the hospital and you never came.”

“You were in the hospital because you are a psycho who likes pain,” Everest said. “And you played this poor guy, making him feel sorry for you, so he’d stay. I do have a question, though. That day that Mom had her heart attack, and you were ‘attacked,’ what actually happened?”

Since she wasn’t paying attention to me, I pulled my phone out, hit record, and tucked it into the front of my pants.

I moved closer so that whatever she said would hopefully be picked up well by the camera’s microphone.

My movement didn’t garner her attention, though.

I kept moving toward Pepper, nearly at her side, when Sage finally began.

“Oh, why not?” she said. “I mean, I guess you might as well know.”

We all waited, and she gave a great, theatrical pause before starting. “I was with my newest boyfriend, Teddy. Teddy and I were going back and forth on whose job it was to pay for some… expenses that might or might not have been accrued by me.”

“Oh, tell us about these charges.” Wendy snorted.

“Well,” she smiled then. “I found out that he was thinking about buying a new car, and he wouldn’t let me buy the old one from him. So I might or might not have destroyed his credit.”

“Let me guess,” Pepper snorted. “You took out credit cards in his name? How’d you find his social security number?”

It sounded like she was experienced in such matters.

My hand fisted at my side.

“Oh, it was a couple of online loans.” She waved her hand through the air as if it was no big deal that she’d committed identity theft.

As if she’d done it all the fucking time.

And maybe she had.

I didn’t have a good feeling that she hadn’t done it to the people she should’ve cared about the most.

“Let me guess,” Everest drawled. “You took out enough loans to buy the car he wanted?”

“How’d you guess?” She batted her eyelashes at him.

“Because you did the same thing to Tarrant in high school.” Everest didn’t sound amused.

“Eh,” she waved her hand away. “That was such a long time ago.”

It may have been a long time ago, but I could see the anger on Everest and Pepper’s faces, and they didn’t look like they’d forgotten. It didn’t matter how much time had passed.

“Back to the story,” Wendy ordered.

Sage humored Wendy.

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