Page 82 of The Fun Part
I get teary.
She pulls out a seat. “Oh no, what happened? Did it get too real?” I guess I didn’t tell Harper the whole story. All these feelings I didn’t want to admit to anyone. For good reason too. Now they left a hole in my heart.
I nod. “I’m an idiot. I knew I should’ve kept it casual from the start. He came at me demanding answers for how complicated things got, and then when I said I don’t know the answer, he ended it. Fake, friends, or otherwise, his exact words. It takes two people to make a complication, right?”
“Right,” Harper says around a bite of cookie. “What a jerk.”
“Hey! That’s my brother,” Sutton says. “He seems upset too.”
“Sorry,” Harper says. “Usually in solidarity we follow the all-men-are-pigs rule.”
Sutton laughs. “Let me tell you about my pig.” She fills Harper in on the John situation, complete with the pregnant girlfriend.
“Damn,” Harper says. “You win the loser Olympics. Not you, him. You deserve all the cookies and the wine too.”
“It’s not even noon,” I say.
“At least give her milk. Sutton, you can dunk as much as you want, and we won’t make any comments about gross crumbs.”
Sutton laughs. “You said she was funny.”
Harper leans back and smirks. “See, Sutton thinks I’m funny.”
I roll my eyes. “I said ‘she thinks she’s funny,’ meaning you think that. Not you are funny.”
“Hmph. Milk?”
“Yes, please,” Sutton says.
Harper gets out the milk and pours Sutton a glass. “Did Cal say why he wanted to end the fake-dating thing? Maybe he wants the real thing?”
“Oh!” Sutton exclaims. “That could be it. When we were at Dad’s house, Cal kept watching you with this adoring puppy-dog look when he thought you weren’t looking.”
“Doubtful,” I say. “I have to move on. My heart can’t take this back and forth anymore. Sutton, if you want a running partner, I run every morning at six a.m. Unless I’ve had a late night. Sleep’s just as important as exercise, and it really helps with stress like from certain unmentionable people.”
Sutton dunks her cookie in milk and takes a bite, her expression blissful. Fresh-baked cookies can do that for a person. “Sure. Can we do seven?”
“That works too.” I sigh, wishing I could bounce back the way Sutton seems to be doing. She’s one of those naturally cheerful people. Cal said she was like sunshine. Cal with the dark soulful eyes, the terrible taste in baseball movies, the sexy everything, the tolerance for my family. You don’t find that combination in just anyone. This sucks. I wish—
“Okay, I’m only going to say this once,” Harper announces, startling me out of my downward spiral. “I saw you after you first hooked up with Cal, and you were smitten.”
“Smitten?” I echo, shocked she’d use a word like that. Then I remember she’s shifted to the dark side. She’s a romance reader whobelieves.
“Aww,” Sutton says. “I could totally see that the first time I saw you two together on our video call.”
I purse my lips. “I was not smitten. I’ve never been smitten in my life.”
Harper barrels on. “You couldn’t stay away from him, and even after you ended it, you still found a way to spend time with him with your whole fake-relationship thing.”
Sutton shakes her head. “You guys didn’t look like you were faking at my dad’s house.”
“That was us being friends at that point,” I say.
Sutton tilts her head. “I didn’t get that feeling at all.”
“Nobody did,” Harper says. “So let’s review. You introduced yourself to him as someone not looking for anything serious. You were upfront with strong boundaries.”
“Yes!” Finally they’re understanding why this is all Cal’s fault.
