Page 28 of What If I Hate You
“I mean is there another problem here I don’t know about? Something I can help you with, or do you just get off on being the token bitch?"
His words drop like a live wire, and the world telescopes to the point where I can feel my own heartbeat thudding in my jaw. The words token bitch hang between us, ugly and sour, and for the first time in forever I want to look away, crawl out of my own skin, anything to not be in this moment. I get this kind of behavior all the time from the guys who work in my field. On any given day I can usually shake it off as professional jealousy at its finest, but getting the same push back from one of the players?
Fuck.
It’s a low blow.
And it hurts more than I want to admit.
I don’t realize I’m going to slap him until my palm cracks against his cheek with a sound like a puck shattering glass. The shock ripples through my arm, through my entire body, and for a split second I worry I’ve gone too far. My hand stings and so does something deep inside my chest.
He doesn’t even blink. Doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move, just stands there with a faint red mark blooming across the angled bone, his eyes hard and wet with something I don’t have a wordfor. We’re locked like that—me with my hand frozen, him with his pride split open—for three long, shivering breaths.
“Don’t you ever talk to me like that again,” I say, voice trembling with the aftershock, with the memory of every time a man has spat that word through clenched teeth or a syrupy smile and expected me to take it. “You have no fucking clue who I am, Cunningham. Sure as fuck not in some shithole bar bathroom with a blonde on your arm and my name still stuck in your teeth.” The words tear out of me, ragged, half a sob and half a command. My pulse screams in my ears. My face is hot and my eyes burn, but I refuse to break, not in front of him, not ever.
I have to get out of here before I fall apart.
I push past him, my shoulder catching the side of his arm, and fumble blindly for the door.
“Rivers…” he shouts, my name a plea, but I refuse to turn around as I step out to the hallway. “Blakely!”
Nope.
Not answering.
Instead, I head straight for the door and out into the cold sting of an Ohio winter. I send a text to Marlee so she knows where I am and then practically run the city block back to our hotel. I’m almost there before I realize I’m crying. Not the hot, streaming, mascara-ruining kind I got good at holding in growing up, but the tiny, infuriating pinpricks at the corners of my eyes, the ones you can almost hide if you keep moving.
Just keep moving.
I claw open the door to my room and hurl myself onto my bed.
Tonight is not the first time I’ve been called a bitch and it won’t be the last, I’m certain, but this one—hearing it from Barrett of all people—landed somewhere deep down in my chest.
And I don’t like it.
CHAPTER NINE
BARRETT
Fuck.
If there’s a record for ruining a night out in under two minutes, I think I just broke it. The door to the women’s bathroom swings shut behind me, and I stand there in the dumb, echoey corridor, not quite sure which primitive urge is going to win out. Punch the wall or run until my lungs collapse. Instead, I settle for standing like an idiot, cemented to the tile, the flush in my face burning so hot I could set off the smoke alarms.
Her slap still tingles, a perfect outline across my cheek. I’m pretty sure I deserved it—hell, I know I did—but that doesn’t slow the sick knot spooling in my gut. I try to replay what just happened, see if there’s a version where I don’t fuck it up, but the tape always ends the same. Me, mouth running, brain trailing somewhere ten feet behind, and Rivers looking at me like I just sliced her heart wide open.
And dammit, she looked so pretty tonight in that little black dress. It hugged her curves in ways a man has wet dreams about, but could I tell her that? No.
Fuck.
I should have never called her a bitch.
That’s not me. That’s not who I am.
What was I thinking?
Hell, I wasn’t even angry. I just wanted to get under her skin the way she gets under mine.
It’s no excuse, I know. I shouldn’t have stooped so low.
