Page 100 of In For a Penny
His cheeks redden, and he groans, closing his eyes, running both hands through his hair. I know him well enough by now to know that something is really bothering him, that he’s extremely frustrated and stressed. I mean, obviously—it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. He’s here in the middle of the night, almost morning, so there’s that.
“Josh?” I ask. “Listen, it’s getting pretty late, so if you’re not gonna—”
He blows out a breath. “Stop. I will. Just give me a second to organize my thoughts.”
Now I’m just annoyed. You’d figure that when someone decides to make a surprise visit at three in the freaking morning, they’d at least know what the hell they’re going to say.
I roll my eyes, at a complete loss. I have no idea what he’s doing here or what he came to talk about.
“You and me,” he says, pointing back and forth between us. “We need to talk about you and me.”
Gut punch. The air is knocked out of me, but I swiftly recover.
“I thought we talked about this already. Why are you bringing this up again?” I can hear it in my voice—the warning, the venom.
Don’t do this, Josh. I will shut you down and end this friendship if I have to.
He shakes his head, desperate. “No,” he says. “No, no, no.No.”
I glare at him. “What do you mean ‘no’? We talked about this, Josh. There is no ‘you and me’.”
He scoffs. “You’re so full of shit, you know that?”
Now I’m pissed.
“Alright, time to go,” I say, grabbing him by the shoulders, trying to spin him around and push him out my bedroom door, but he slips away from me.
“No, we’re gonna talk about this.”
“I don’t even know what ‘this’ you’re talking about,” I lie.
“I’m not leaving until you listen to me, becauseI knowthat I’m not crazy.”
I sigh and look out the window at Canary Wharf. I can see the KPMG and Barclays buildings in the distance, which will soon be filled with employees in just a couple of hours, thanks to their miserable working schedules. Miserable as they are, I would trade places with them in a heartbeat just to avoid having this discussion right now.
“So, after I picked up the food before dinner, I went to pick up Eloise, and we hung out at her place for a while—”
I put my face in my hands and groan silently. I really don’t want to hear this.
“See? That reaction right there tells me that you’re definitely full of shit.”
“Can we speed this up? I’m tired and want to go to sleep,” I say impatiently. He looks tired, too, but in a different kind of way. In a way that tells me he’s done fighting this silent battle with me and the wall I built up. I imagine Josh as Andy Drufresne fromShawshank Redemption,trying like hell to dig his way out of the prison cell now known as theFriend Zone, only to be told time and time again by me to fuck off.
He sighs loudly, eyes wide. “Goddammit! Just listen to me, alright?” He runs his fingers through his hair again, agitated. “So, I’m at Eloise’s, and we’re on her couch.”I’m gonna throw up. I swear I’m gonna throw up the ten million pounds of food I just ate all over Josh. “And her hand is on my thigh, and she’s talking, and I’m looking at her lips, and it’s obvious we’re about to kiss, and all I’m thinking about is how I’m gonna have to figure out a way to clean my lips of her stupid fucking bright-red lipstick without using sandpaper because, Jesus Christ, that shit takes forever to come off. But I felt like I really didn’t have a choice because she kept talking and talking and—it sounds awful—but I wasn’t really listening, or I was trying not to, because I kept comparing her to you, and that’s not fair to anyone—especially not her. So, I pulled back right before our lips touched and told her I didn’t want to keep you waiting and that we needed to go to your place immediately because of the food I was in charge of bringing. As you can guess, she didn’t take that too well, so my night started off rocky to begin with.”
He stops to take a deep breath and looks out the window. “Tonight was our third date, did you know that?”
I gasp a little. I feel like someone just stabbed me.
Excuse me, they’ve been going out on dates? I thought they had hooked up at Jane’s and that was it. I thought this was their first date. Since when have they been actively dating?
“No,” I say quietly. “I did not know that.”
“Yeah.” He nods, his gaze locking on mine. “So, you can imagine Eloise had some expectations on how tonight would go.”
I know what a third date means.
Oh no.
