Page 81 of Kiss & Collide
And she’d helped make it happen. So why was she soangry? At the end of the day, if he wanted to wrangle a better deal for himself, he was free to do it.
She’d already succeeded, regardless of what happened next.
She set her coffee down on the table, hard.
Let him fuck off to LA with Madison and to Allegri with Eric Lenore. Both she and Pinnacle could survive his departure.
“Where is he?”
Violet looked up in surprise. Rabia tilted her chin at Violet’s phone. “Chase. Where is he right now?”
Violet glanced down. Without realizing it, she’d opened her phone again and started scrolling the hashtag for Madison’s movie, looking for more photos of the two of them.
With a snort of disgust, she swiped it closed again.Pull it together, Violet.He’s just some fucking guy.
“Um, LA. He’s at the premiere for Madison Mitchell’s new movie. That actor he’s dating.”
Rabia let out a snort of disbelief.
“What? He is.”
“I’m sure he’s in LA. But he’s not dating that girl. He’s datingyou. Everybody knows that, Violet.”
“He’s not … I’m … we’re not …” God, she never had a problem speaking off the cuff. She could bullshit an answer with the best of them.
Rabia shrugged. “I don’t know what you young people call it these days, but whatever it is, you two are doing it.”
She took a deep breath and cleared her head, so she could pick her way carefully through this. “We’ve been very casually involved in the past. But we’re not dating.”
“So you’re sleeping with him.” A statement, not a question.
“Yes, but—”
“But he’s in LA with that girl?”
“It’s fine. He’s free to do whatever—”
Rabia shook her head. “It seems complicated. When I met Rajan, he just asked me to get a coffee after class. Then it was dinner. And a few months later we got married. Simple.”
“You’remarried?” She’d known Rabia for months now and talked to her almost daily, and she’d had no idea there was a husband in the mix.
“Twenty-three years,” she replied, turning her phone to show Violet. Her lock screen showed her and some man—the husband—sitting in the sun, at a wooden table outside a pub, both smiling and lifting pints to whoever had taken the picture. He looked friendly and unassuming—roughly Rabia’s age, salt-and-pepper hair, also Southeast Asian. “Rajan Dar. He’s a podiatrist.”
“A podiatrist? And you work in racing? How does that work?”
She shrugged again. “We have our own interests. I respect his, he respects mine. It works because we want it to.”
“And he doesn’t mind you spending half the year on the road?”
“Nope. He gets the Netflix all to himself and I don’t have to watch those Korean gangster dramas he loves so much.” She chuckled softly. “He trusts me, if that’s what you’re asking. And I trust him.”
“Wow. I can’t imagine that.” She hadn’t been able to turn her back on Ian for a millisecond without some other girl moving in. And Chase had just run off to LA with a movie star, so she was sticking to type, apparently.
“When it’s right … when you’rereadyfor it to be right … it’s easy. What you’re doing?” Rabia’s eyebrows hiked behind her glasses. “That sounds hard. Exhausting, really. Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Do you like him?”
