Page 79 of Illicit Illustration

“Did you even ask her that?”

“She made her choice clear,” I said, defeated, as I gestured down the hallway to the closed bathroom door. If she had any desire to talk to me, she wouldn’t be hiding. And she wouldn’t have looked at me like I broke her heart. The way she’d looked at me was going to fucking haunt me.

“Fine, be a chickenshit,” he scoffed. “Go ahead and leave. Maybe you’re right. Maybe you aren’t good enough for her because you’re just rolling over like a coward without even trying.”

“Fuck off,” I muttered, my eyes stinging. “You don’t know how hard it is to know I’m not the right guy for her.”

Hudson stepped to the side, gesturing toward the back door with a look of disgust on his face. “Guess we’ll never know now.”

Hazel

I wasn’t sure howlong I’d been sitting on the closed toilet seat lid, staring at the latch on the bathroom stall I’d locked myself inside, but judging from the tingling sensation running up the back of my legs, it’d been a while.

When I’d escaped in here, swiping tears from my eyes, I’d been crushed. Because yet again, I’d been gullible enough to believe that I was a good judge of character.

It seemed my fatal flaw was seeing the best in people. Blindly assuming unless they did something truly, overtly malicious, that they had my best interests at heart.

And now it was clear that not only had Reid kept things from me, but so had my best friend. Who was in love with my brother, who’d I’d just told this morning that I was in love with his best friend. Joke was on me, because apparently, they all fucking sucked.

If Reid had told me who he was pretending to be even a few days ago, before I confessed what was going on to Charley, then I might have been able to salvage my dignity. But now I was going to have to spend the rest of my life in this toilet stall.

Because there was no way in hell I was leaving it to face what happened.

I didn’t want anyone’s pity, and I really didn’t want to have to explain how epically unobservant I clearly was. Although, considering he’d been purposely texting me from a number I’d never seen before, Reid had known exactly what he was doing.

The only question that still bothered me was why.

If he knew when he volunteered to help me with my commissions that he had already earned my number as Seven, then why did he even bother with the ruse? What exactly was in this elaborate plan of his to get close to me?

I wasn’t sure what to think of him right now. He’d never gone to lengths like this before—at least not that I’d heard of—to get the attention of a woman. So why me? What was so special about me he felt the need to not only deceive me under the guise of anonymity but invade my life in such a personal manner and share all the intimate moments we had the last two weeks?

Was this all a game to him? A way to fool an inexperienced girl into believing that he had genuine feelings for her.

If I read this in one of the countless romance novels I’d devoured over the last several months, I would want to kick the heroine’s ass for being so clueless.

I’d also probably want to kick her ass for not immediately calling the hero out on his bullshit and demanding answers from him. But hindsight and firsthand mortification were 20/20.

“Haz? You in here?”

“Fuck,” I hissed under my breath, carefully pulling my legs up so she couldn’t see them from underneath the stall door. Maybe if I just pretended I wasn’t in here, then she would go away and let me wallow in peace. But, of course, she knew I was in here, because she’d had to unlock the door to get in.

“Come on, sweetheart. Come out and talk to me. Hudson told me Reid left right after he told you. What happened?”

“Oh, you mean you don’t already know? I thought maybe since you’d been in on the whole thing that you’d already gotten a full update on how fucking shocked I was from your lying little bestie.”

“I know you’re mad, honey, but…”

“Mad,” I scoffed, shaking my head. “I’m not fucking mad. I’m heartbroken. And I feel really fucking stupid that I fell for whatever in the hell was going on. And not only did you know about it; you encouraged it. This is what you were talking about this morning,right? When you said I needed to keep an open mind because it wasn’t your story to tell?”

“Yeah, but…”

“There is no,yeah, butCharley. You should have told me. I guess at least he revealed himself in Hudson’s office and not in a room full of people. Because then I might be able to forget what happened, or at least fake it long enough to show my face in the bar again. Hopefully, no one else finds out, because if this hits the small-town rumor mill, I’ll need to change my name and move across the country. I guess I can at least draw fucking dicks from anywhere.” My voice continued to rise as the panic mixed with anger flowed through my veins. “What if someone was walking down the hallway long enough to put together what happened? What if one of those women out there who also apparently fell for his charming bullshit found out that the only person Seven messaged was really his best friend’s naïve little sister?”

“Hazel, none of that happened, but it might if you keep yelling about it in here.”

“I’m not fucking yelling,” I hissed, standing up and pulling the stall door open, but of course I couldn’t even do that right and the pocket of my dress caught on the latch. I heard the material rip before I looked down to see the several inches long gaping hole in the side seam where the stitches had now come undone. “Great, just fucking great. Now I’m gonna flash my underwear at anyone who is loitering in the hallway when I finally decide to make a break for it and go hide in my apartment where I’m going to have to buy a legion of cat plushies to fulfill my life’s mission of becoming a fucking cat lady before I’m twenty-five.”

“Haz, breathe.” Charley mimicked breathing in slowly through her nose and out through her mouth, eyes widening as I stomped to where she was standing against the closed door.

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