Page 17 of Worth the Wait

“The ones in the limo, and then I just drank two more in, like, two minutes.” I shook my head. “I need water.”

“Come on.” She looped her arm through mine and pulled me in the opposite direction of where I had originally started to go. “The restroom is right up there.” She pointed, and I wanted to sprint toward it, but refrained myself from attempting to run in heels.

“Wait one sec.” She dropped my arm and raced toward a bar.

When she returned and I saw her carrying two bottles of water, I almost broke down.

I was a mess.

“I can’t believe you told him I was writing a book,” I said once we walked through the ornate door of the restroom and locked it behind us. I was relieved to see that it only held a single stall and that we were alone.

Sarina laughed as she handed me my water. “I know. Me neither, but I panicked!” She reached for my shoulders and leveled me with a look. “Did you at least like him?”

I downed half the bottle. “That Colter guy?” I thumbed behind me, like he was standing right there. “No.”

She popped out her hip and put a hand on it. “Why not? He said he’d help you with your nonexistent book.”

“He gave me creepy salesman vibes.” My lips formed a frown.

“I mean, you’re not wrong. He is in sales,” she confirmed. “The kind that makes a boatload of money.”

“It’s not really my thing.”

“Which part? The money or salesman?”

“Both,” I said because I’d learned pretty quickly since moving here that people with a lot of money also had a lot of expectations.

“I thought Patrick was rich?”

When Sarina said his name, I swore my heart skipped a beat. She always spoke about him like she knew him when she didn’t.

“He has a lot of money, yeah. But it’s not the same,” I started to explain before deciding that I didn’t want to.

Sarina wouldn’t understand, or she would try to make excuses for why the rich New Yorkers were the way that they were.

The elite that I’d been exposed to weren’t typically fun, carefree, or lighthearted individuals. You would think that financial freedom would have afforded them all of those traits, but it didn’t seem to. The rich people I’d been around wanted you to know they were rich. They demanded to be treated in a certain way. Catered to. Fawned over. Deemed themselves far more special than anyone else in the room.

Patrick wasn’t anything like that. No one in Sugar Mountain was. You could be sitting next to a millionaire at the local saloon, and you’d have no idea. That was the kind of rich I liked. The quiet kind. Unassuming.

“I need to pee.” I walked into the stall and closed the solid door behind me before reaching for my phone.

Opening up the Messages app, I read through my and Patrick’s old messages. They’d grown so far and few between in the last few years that I read through them all in a couple of swipes of my finger. I longed to tell him I missed him. That I still thought about him every single day. But every time one of us opened that door, we’d slam it shut just as quickly.

And that part always hurt.

That first text would fill me with hope and make my heart race in anticipation of his response, which always came. But the inevitable messages that followed, saying that weprobably shouldn’t talk anymore, would make me physically ache, even if it was the right thing to do.

And if time was supposed to heal all wounds, it was doing a really crappy job on mine. I still felt ripped open and raw, especially on nights like tonight, when the alcohol flowed a little too much and all I wanted was Patrick by my side.

My choices haunted me.

Not so much that I’d left Patrick behind to follow my dreams, but more so that I’d stayed gone for so long. What kind of person walked away from the love of their life and never looked back?

MY GIRL AND THE PARTY BOY

PATRICK

Icouldn’t stop staring at my phone.

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