Page 95 of Someone You Deserve

“Then good for you. I have the week off between Christmas and New Year’s, and I can’t fucking wait,” Parker adds.

“So where are you headed?” Grady asks, turning his attention to me.

I don’t want to come up with some elaborate lie that I’ll have to remember later, but until Astrid and I discuss when and how to tell him, I’m going to be as vague as possible. “Up to the mountains.”

“Damn, that’s far.”

“I know, but I just want to get out of Carrington Cove for a bit. I’ve been working too fucking hard, and if I stay in town, I’m just going to be tempted to work on something instead of relaxing.

“Makes sense. Maybe we need to plan a guys’ weekend sometime soon then? Just a bunch of boys in the woods, drinking beer, going fishing…” Grady suggests.

“Fuck, I’m down,” Dallas says. “I’d have to run it by Willow first, of course.”

Parker laughs. “You’re not even married and you’re already whipped?”

Dallas arches a brow at him. “Are you telling me that if you’d married Sasha, you wouldn’t put her before everything else?”

I tense up at the mention of Parker’s ex-fiancé, wary of his reaction. “I’ve asked you not to bring her up,” Parker says through clenched teeth.

“Well, if you’re going to pass judgment on my relationship with Willow, then Sasha is fair game.”

Grady looks back and forth between the two of them. “Uh, did I miss something? Parker was engaged?” he asks.

“Unfortunately,” Parker says swiftly. “And we’re not talking about it anymore. Got it?”

“Okay then,” Grady draws out. Silence descends on us, but Grady offers up a distraction. “Penn got hit in the face with a dildo this weekend,” he says. Parker starts choking on his food, Dallas throws his head back in laughter, and I shove Grady off his stool.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“What? I needed to lighten the mood,” Grady replies.

“And that’s what you went with?”

Dallas has tears streaming down his face. “I’m just mad that Grady beat me to the punch.”

“How the fuck does everyone know about that?” I ask, fucking pissed that I have to relive this embarrassment again.

Grady clears his throat. “Dude, did you forget that half the women in town were at that party?”

“The best part is, it was Hazel that threw it at him,” Dallas manages to say through his laughter, and the other two morons lose their shit.

Standing from my stool, I head for the door. “You know what? That’s fine. Everyone have a good laugh at my expense, but I’ve got work to do so I can fucking enjoy myself this weekend.”

Dallas calls out to me as I get closer to the door. “Hope you have a goodfuckingtime,” he says, hinting at my true intentions this weekend.

And with that, I flip him off and exit the restaurant, eager to complete what I need to so I can relax this weekend. But Dallas’s comment about our dad eats at me all night.

So that’s when I decide that before I pick up Astrid tomorrow, I’m going to put in my two weeks’ notice with him and Mrs. Hansen at the hardware store.

I can’t keep living my life for someone else. I have to make the changes I set out to when I took on this venture and when I pursued Astrid. I need to full commit.

Let’s just hope that all these changes I’m making don’t come back to bite me in the ass.

***

“Well, that was kind of stressful,” Astrid says from the passenger seat of my truck as we head toward the highway that will take us to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the western part of the state.

“You mean sneaking out of your house before the sun rises?”

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