Page 89 of For Butter or Worse
“Look, you called me—not your sister. You know if you called your sister, she’d tell you to go running back to him. But you called me, so do you want to hear what I think?”
Nina wasn’t sure, but to Jasmine’s point, she hadn’t dialed Sophie. Almost subconsciously, she had reached out to Jasmine. So now she’d have to at least hear her out. “Yes.”
“You don’t give second chances,” Jasmine said. “Why would Leo be any different?”
Nina blinked. Of course, her friend was right. Her mom had always reinforced that when someone shows you who they are, that’s exactly who they are. There’s no changing another human being. No point in giving them another chance to right their wrongs. Because, in the end, they’d just revert to the person they’d always been from the beginning.
So why was she still holding on to Leo, if she already knew who he was, and had known for years?
“You’re right,” she said to Jasmine.
“Good, now I’ve got to go before my rhubarb burns.”
“Happy cooking,” Nina said before Jasmine hung up.
She slid farther into the water, letting it rise around her shoulders until just her head was above the surface. Even though she agreed with Jasmine, part of her wondered if she should chase after him. But she’d been broken before and beat down enough from her last relationship that the urge to pursue him felt impossible. She wasn’t ready to be rejected, not by the man she loved most.
34
LEO
“Why do you own so many onesies?” Leo asked Gavin.
They were in Gavin’s bedroom, and he’d laid out five different options on the dresser: a unicorn onesie, cat-eared onesie, T-rex onesie, panda onesie and shark onesie. They were having an emergency womb-mates sleepover.
“Dude, why don’t you own any onesies? That’s the better question.” Gavin was already wearing his choice—a Batman onesie, complete with a flowing black cape in the back. “They’re cute and cozy as hell.”
Leo sighed and grabbed the T-rex onesie. Admittedly, the scale details across the arms were cool.
“Wise decision.” He slapped Leo on the back as he walked out of the room. “Grabbing the snacks!”
The sleepover was Gavin’s form of an intervention. The hospital stint had been one thing, but then Leo’s subsequent verbal diarrhea on IG and the pit of despair he’d sunken into had tipped things over the edge. Which just meant that Leo was going to sleep over at Gavin’s so his brother could keep an eye on him. All Leo wanted to do was find a dark room and keep refreshing his messages to see if Nina had commented.
He knew that Nina didn’t owe him any kind of response. And the whole point of posting to IG had been so that Nina could finally be free of him. He’d done the right thing for her, and he wanted to respect her silence. But that silence also clawed at his insides like a rake in the sandpit of his heart.
When Leo had left the hospital, #BanNina was trending. The announcement about Charlie had come out, and the fans blamed Nina for Leo being ousted as well, since Charlie was her ex. Then she’d been seen with Charlie on multiple occasions, so the public had assumed Nina had arranged for Charlie to be the new host. They believed that on top of dumping Leo, she’d also had a hand in Leo being dumped from the show.
The fans turned against her: memes were made of her crying face, and her IG comment section filled up with snake emojis. The shift in loving Nina to vilifying her again had been so swift that Leo had almost missed the transition. Maybe they’d blamed her because it was easier to point the finger at a woman they’d been trained to hate and told was the “evil” one on the show. Either way, sexism was clearly alive and very real on the internet.
Leo had never paid much attention to Nina’s comment feed in the past, but now that he’d seen what she was up against, he regretted not intervening sooner.
So he’d published his breakup IG post and taken responsibility for being therealbad guy of the show. He’d released her, because it was the right thing to do, and he owed her an out.
He knew no one could love her as deeply as he could, but he had to keep his distance so he could do right by her.
Gavin sat on the couch. “Okay, so we’re going to watch a sappy movie, and I’ll have the tissues ready for when you want to cry it out.” An array of snacks were on the coffee table—popcorn, Brie, chocolate malt balls and lots of beer.
“You don’t have to do this.” His brother hated rom-coms, and all Leo wanted to do was go to bed and stay there until he forgot Nina’s name. So forever, basically. “I’m fine, really.”
“Would you just accept help when it’s given? Have you learned nothing from your visit to the emergency room?” Gavin looked at him like he was a fucking moron, and he absolutely was, but still.
“I don’t deserve help,” Leo said softly.
Gavin fanned the bat cape behind him as he leaned back into the couch. He cracked his knuckles, then looked at Leo. “We’re not doing that. We’re not going to feel sorry for ourselves tonight. That’s not what I’m going to let you do. Here’s what I will allow—if you want to acknowledge that you were a rude, straight-dude prick to a strong woman who did nothing but work her ass off to get where she got, then we can do that.”
Gavin’s lips pursed as he looked at Leo. Leo blinked, and he could only imagine the tight little grimace his face was making at the truth to his brother’s words.
“Would you like to say out loud that you were a douchebag to Nina, even though you already wrote it out in your sad little Instagram post?” Gavin added.
