Page 28 of Hard to Forgive

“What’s wrong?”

“Jonas,” I confessed. I heard her heavy sigh on the other end of the phone. “I know. It’s tactless to call you about him, but I fucked up Riah, and you’re kind of the only person I can talk to about it.”

“Because you know that no matter how much you fuck up, I’m not going to hate you?” she chirped.

“Something like that.”

“What did you do, Si?” I heard her shuffling around on the other end of the phone.

“Am I interrupting something?”

“Nothing much,” she assured me. “I just—Not important. Spill.”

Great. So not only was I a shitty friend to Isabel, I’d interrupted something with Mariah. “We’ll circle back to what you’re not telling me,” I promised her. “But first, I fucked Jonas.”

“I really wish you had other friends to talk to about this,” Mariah muttered.

I was tactless. I was a terrible person for talking to Mariah about this. I’d been dating her when I kissed Jonas in high school. I hadn’t told her until several months later, when we’d broken up before college. She’d been understandably upset, but she’d still talked to me. She’d never cut me out of her life.

Maybe I should have found literally anyone else to talk to about this. I’m sure I could have burdened some random man on Swyper about it. Too bad I hadn’t thought about that until just now.

She cleared her throat, pulling me back to our conversation. “Look, you’ve already started, so how about you stop beating yourself up for a mistake you made in high school and tell me what happened.”

I sighed. “I don’t deserve you.”

“You never did, but we already knew that.”

I let out a bark of laughter. “Okay, so it wasn’t the first time,” I admitted. “I hooked up with him at the bar last week. Before I knew who he was. The night before I started work, actually.” I waited for that to sink in. “Anyway, we got on the same team and he reacted… badly.”

“Do you blame him? Not everyone is as evolved as I am and able to move past their high school traumas.”

I rolled my eyes. “Do you want to hear this or not?”

“Well, I’m invested now.” She fell silent. I waited for her to say something else, but instead she just made a noise that was very obviously meant to encourage me to go on.

So I did. “Then today, he was in a shitty mood. This girl from our team, Isabel, went to check on him and he lashed out on her completely. It was—” I couldn’t think of the right word for it and remembering the way he attacked her made me want to go back to his place and punch him in the face. But clearly, I couldn’t betrusted to make those decisions, so I chose the wiser action of staying put. “It was bad, Riah. But I went to his place after work to try to talk to him and one thing led to another and the next thing I knew, I was fucking him over his bathroom sink.”

“You couldn’t even make it to a bed?”

“That is not the point!” I exclaimed.

“That seems to be an important point. Do you even know when the last time he cleaned his bathroom was?” I could hear the judgment in her voice. Of course, that would be what she judged me on. I didn’t say anything, and she seemed to catch my disapproval over the phone. “Anyway, continue.”

“I’m a shitty friend.”

“We already knew this. Why do you think you don’t have a lot of friends?”

“I can always count on you for honesty,” I grumbled.

“Yes, you can,” she answered bluntly. “But you went over there with good intentions. Did you at least get through to him before you got him naked?”

I thought back to the stubborn way in which he insisted he wasn’t going to apologize. “I don’t think I did,” I admitted. “Turns out, he’s as stubborn as I am.”

“Was that a touch of admiration in your voice?” she teased.

“Absolutely not. I can’t stand the guy.”

“Yet you stuck your dick in him. Twice.”

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