Page 5 of Sleeping with the Frenemy

Kamilah sat in one chair and Sofi sat in the other.

It was clear that Kamilah had a man she loved and trusted, a business she was killing at running, and a place she felt safe and happy in. Meanwhile, Sofi still couldn’t figure out what she wanted out of life. It was as if their roles had suddenly switched.

Sofi shifted in her seat. She had no idea how to start, but opened her mouth to try her best. Except Kamilah spoke first.

“I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am for lying to you,” she began, her golden brown eyes earnest. “It was a lie I never should’ve told and I especially shouldn’t have held on to that secret for as long as I did. You were right when you said that I probably never would’ve told the truth if it hadn’t come out on its own.” She gulped. “I was a coward and I chose to tell lies in order to avoid facing the truth. I hurt you with my selfish actions and I’m sorry for that. Truly. You’ve never been anything but supportive and amazing and I took advantage of that.” She paused and sucked in a much-needed breath.

It seemed that not everything had changed. Kamilah still had the tendency to throw words out in tangled clusters.

Sofi held up a hand before Kamilah could start in on more apologies. “I know my reaction seemed extreme and I finally realized that you deserve to know why.”

Kamilah’s head tilted to the side and her brow furrowed. “I know how you are. You value honesty over anything else and I wasn’t honest with you.”

Sofi winced. “Yeah that’s not exactly it.” She took a breath to brace herself. “There are a lot of things you don’t know, because I wasn’t honest with you either. At least not completely.”

“What do you mean?”

Sofi looked at her hands. “I told you that I decided not to pursue nursing anymore because I wanted to actually make money. I didn’t want to be living paycheck to paycheck like my mom and all stressed.”

“Yes,” Kamilah nodded.

“That’s not the whole story. It’s true that when you didn’t go to Paris, my mom begged me not to go, because she didn’t think I would survive without you. She always considered you the grounded one.”

“If only she knew what a mess I really am.”

Sofi shook her head. “No, you aren’t a mess. You’re a go-getter and an optimist. You’re willing to take chances on your ideas, no matter how impractical, because you honestly believe that it will work out in the end.” Sofi motioned around them. “And it has.”

“Not completely. I lost my best friend because of my tendency to leap first and ask questions later.”

“Listen, that was mostly on me. The truth is that I didn’t have any backup schools like you did, so when we didn’t go to Paris, I had nothing to fall back on. I was panicked. Then my dad stepped in.”

Kamilah sucked in a breath. She knew what that meant for Sofi, who’d never had the best relationship with her dad.

“He said that if I went to school for business, with the understanding that I’d stay working with him, he’d get me into school and pay for it,” Sofi continued. “All four years if not more. It turned out that he’d made friends with a member of a certain university’s board after working on a campaign with them.

“It just made sense for me to agree. I mean what the hell else was I going to do?” Sofi asked. “Get some dead-end part-time job that would stress me out, exhaust me, and keep me broke? Some shithole I’d get stuck in working my ass off only to be putting the real money in someone else’s pocket? I refused to be just like every other uneducated brown daughter of a poor single mother.”

“Oh, Sofi.” Kamilah shook her head. “There is nothing wrong with being a hard worker and there is nothing wrong with coming from a single parent home. There is nothing that says that your origin dictates where you end up in life.” It was a conversation they’d had many times in the past, but Kamilah didn’t really get it.

She came from a two-parent home where her siblings all had the same parents. And sure, she had her tan skin, curly hair, and curvy body, but Kamilah was still mostly European.

Sofi was the Black daughter of a biracial Afro-Latina who had been wined and dined by a charming rich man until he kicked her to the curb and left her with nothing. From as long as she could remember, assumptions about Sofi’s future had been made by everyone who knew her upbringing. She obviously wasn’t going to amount to much because, sure she was pretty, but that was all she had going for her. She’d end up as some guy’s arm candy and if she was smart, she’d figure out how to cash in on that. Otherwise she’d be a formerly beautiful woman whose looks faded because she’d been forced to toil just to stay poor—like her mother. At least that’s what her father had told her when she’d won her final beauty pageant.

Sofi had refused to let that happen to her. Not on her fucking watch. There was no fucking way.

“Anyway,” Sofi continued. “I had no choice but to take him up on his offer which is how I’ve ended up there, stuck.”

“I thought you loved your job,” Kamilah said.

“I wanted you to think so. I wanted everyone to think so. But hearing that I went through all of that because of a lie you told to your family...” She paused and shook her head. “It made me mad. I was mad for a while. Then the sense of betrayal and injustice kicked in. Especially after I heard that you and Liam worked it out and got engaged for real, and you fixed things with your family while also getting ownership of the restaurant. Everything worked out for you, but I’m still dealing with the fallout.”

“I can imagine that it felt like having salt poured in an open wound.”

Especially after Leo had made it clear he was on his sister’s side. Sofi had felt like she’d been betrayed by her best friend (one of the very few people she’d trusted), stuck in a job she hated because she was indebted to the very last person she wanted to feel any obligation toward, and without a love because the man she wanted to be with felt more loyalty to his manipulative family than he did toward her. “I was bitter,” Sofi admitted. “I was so bitter, and it took me a while to figure out that instead of feeling some type of way toward you, I needed to look more at myself. I was the one who ultimately made those choices. I can’t blame that on you.”

“Is that why you left? You went on a journey to find yourself.”

Sofi nodded. “I wanted to see the things I felt like I’d missed out on, and I hoped that I’d gain some sort of clarity.”

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