Page 151 of The Girlfriend Zone

“What did you just say?” I whisper.

The players have all gone. It’s just us in the hallway now.

“Oh god, I’m so sorry,” she says quickly, waving an airy hand my way. “I sometimes forget about your little issue.” Then she raises her voice, over-enunciating each word: “Miles. He can be your date. Won’t that be nice to go with your guy?”

And that’s when my dad emerges from the tunnel at last, stopping dead in his tracks. Tilting his head. Eyes lasered right at me. “Your guy?”

My mom spins around. “Hi, Noah. Good to see you. What a great game.”

But I don’t care about the game, and neither does my father.

“What did you just say, Grace?” he asks, his voice deadly calm.

“I was telling Leighton to bring Miles to my wedding to Michael,” she says, chipper as ever. “You can come too if you want.”

Dad’s gaze whips to me, eyes etched with shock, his jaw set hard.

“You’re in a relationship…with Miles?” he demands, then turns to Mom. “And how did you know before me?”

Mom cackles like it’s the funniest thing in the world. “Oh, Noah, you were never good at anything besides hockey. You just can’t catch on. They went to a coffee shop together before they arrived together, and they had the same name on the cups.Boo.” She pauses dramatically, then adds, “It’s a nickname for a significant other.”

I. Die.

“It’s his dog’s name,” I blurt out defensively, too defensively, but it’ll do nothing pointing out the name of Miles’s mom’s pup.

She laughs. “Leighton, baby. Really?”

“Yes,” I shout because this isn’t how my dad was supposed to find out. This is an epic shit fest.

“We’re rooming together,” I add, scrambling. “We got coffee on the way to work. That was it.”

Oh, fuck. Oh, shit. I’m lying now. I’mmy mother.

And I can’t let that happen. I part my lips to speak, to tell my father the truth I’d planned to tell him before the game when my mother smirks and says, “Is that why you were in the stairwell together too?”

My heart plummets.

She saw us.

“Leighton,” my father says heavily.

The ground is opening up beneath me and swallowing me whole. This is so much worse than I’d imagined.

Mom shrugs. “Besides, I saw the way he looks at you. Like you’re the one. Really, it doesn’t take much to put two and two together. But that was never your forte, was it, Noah?”

She’s awful. But I’m worse.

I turn to my dad. “Yes, we’re together, Dad,” I say just as Miles emerges from the locker room, dressed to board the bus that’ll take them to the team jet.

My dad snaps his gaze to the guy he wants to trade, looking at him like he can’t believe he ever trusted him. Then he looks at me the same way.

I can’t believe how badly I’ve messed everything up.

48

EXCUSES, EXCUSES

Miles

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