Page 6 of My Grumpy Sweetheart
“And for your own good,” Murphy added, biting his lip.
“Okay.” I nodded and took another deep breath. I could still hear the blood rushing in my ears, but it wasn’t as loud as before, a wild river instead of Niagara Falls. Progress. I guess. “Let me get this straight: slavery is okay as long as the proceeds go to charity and it’s for the slave’s own good?”
“Oh, fuck off!” Jason rolled his eyes. “You’re being a drama queen.”
I raised my eyebrows pointedly, doing everything I could not to go off on them again.
But seriously? I was being a drama queen? They’d sold me to some random guy on the internet, but I was a drama queen?
“You get a free vacation out of it,” Murphy said with a wry smile.
“Thanks, but I’ll pass.”
I was on vacation right now, a vacation I actually wanted to be on — with my friends, not some random dude who obviously thought buying people was completely fine.
“You can’t pass. He already paid, and it’s for a good cause.”
“So? Then refund him the money, and he can bid on someone else; easy peasy,” I said with a shrug. I honestly didn’t care about some guy’s money. If one bought people off the internet, one needed to expect unforeseen things to happen. And me not showing up was definitely better than a SWAT team entering his house and arresting him for human trafficking. In my opinion, he should consider himself lucky.
“It’snotthat easy.” Liam sighed heavily, taking a big swig out of his beer bottle like he needed time to brace himself for what he was about to tell me. “Look. This event… the bachelor auction? That took place in June. It was a one-time thing, so if you back out, he gets nothing. No date, no weekend trip, and the queer homeless teens don’t get the money. And even if it wasn’t a one-time thing, the chances of finding someone for next weekend are slim to none.”
I furrowed my brows. “You do know that I’m unavailable next weekend, right? We have plans next weekend.”
None of my friends met my gaze.
Cowards.
“About that…” The vein in my neck started throbbing again as Liam started talking. He usually was the quietest and calmest out of all of us — probably why Jason and Murphy let him do the talking now. It was a lot harder to be mad at him if he kept looking at you with his big, brown doe eyes.
“Let me guess. There is no trip next weekend, right?”
I’d known something was off when they’d made plans for two weekends in a row, but they’d assured me it was just a coincidence. And I’d trusted them. Like a fuckingfool.
“No.” That was Jason speaking. He swallowed nervously. “We needed to make sure you were free that weekend, so we made up the camping trip.”
I nodded slowly, trying to work through all the information without going off again. Oh, how I wanted to tell them off again. I wanted to scream and rant and… I didn’t even know.
I was angry, but foremost, I felt fuckingbetrayed. They were my friends. They were supposed tohavemy back, not stab meinthe back. And yeah, I should work through the pain of their betrayal differently but letting it all out in a giant rant was so fucking tempting.
But I didn’t. Instead, I took another deep breath, balling my fists to let at least a fraction of the tension inside me out.
“Okay. Do I understand correctly that you’ve been planning this whole thing for more thanthree months? And you chose to tell menow? Literally a week before I’m supposed to go on that trip. And your reason for telling me this late is so that I can’t back out without losing that charity money, which means you’re basically forcing my hand?”
I was met with three people staring at the forest floor like it held all the answers of the universe.
Great.
Just fucking great.
Who needed enemies if they had friends like mine?
“If you say it like that, it sounds really bad,” Liam whispered.
“Maybe it sounds really bad because it is,” I snapped, running a hand through my beard.
I knew I wasn’t the easiest person to be around, okay? I was grumpy, a hothead, and a ton of unpleasant things my exes had called me over the years. But never in my thirty-two years of life had I done anything so fucking deceiving to anyone. Not to my enemies, anddefinitelynot to my friends.
“We were drunk and thought… we thought it sounded like a fun idea…”
