Page 89 of Heartbreak & Cupcakes
But I never got the chance to do that. Instead, I brought Lexi home alone to the penthouse. Maddox and Nick boxed up the Chinatown apartment and put everything in storage. I’d never gone through any of our things. I’d always planned to do it, but it had been almost five years and I still hadn’t.
When Maddox got off the phone, he walked up to me shaking his head. Without saying a word, he pulled me into his arms and hugged me tightly. “I’m so proud of you.”
“You are?” I stood, with my arms hanging down, wondering what was going on.
“Yeah.” He pulled back and patted me on my arms.
Nick chuckled as he slapped his hand on Maddox’s shoulder. “Remember that feeling when you’re paying up.”
“What?” My eyes bounced between my friends. Nick was smiling like the cat that ate the canary. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Nothing.” Maddox shook his head.
Nick smiled widely. “We put a stack on if you’d finally make a move on Sadie. I won.”
My friends, my brothers, had bet a thousand dollars on my love life. Why did that not surprise me?
“Who said I made a move?” I had. They just didn’t have any proof of said moves.
Nick’s smile remained in place. “You took her as your date to the biggest event in the city, where you were the guest of honor, with media everywhere. I would definitely qualify that as making a move.”
“Mia bailed at the last minute. I didn’t even know that Sadie was going until I walked out to leave.”
Both men looked at each other for a beat and then back to me.
Maddox’s grin dropped in disappointment. I wasn’t sure what he was sad about. I was saving him a grand.
Nick stared at me like I was full of shit. Which I was. “Well, it looked like you two had averygood time.”
I’d only seen a few of the pictures on a few sites, but I understood why they’d think that. In them Sadie and I looked like a happy couple. But those were split second moments captured in a four-hour span to serve the narrative of clickbait.
The reality was, I’d barely spoken to her the entire evening and I felt like shit about that. The few times I had checked to make sure she was okay were captured from several different angles.
“We barely spoke.”
Nick crossed his arms in front of his chest and tilted his head to the side. “So, you’re saying nothing happened between you two?”
Images of the kiss we’d shared at the elevator, my hands slipping around her waist in the hallway, my face between her thighs in my bed, and finally her curling up against me while we slept flashed through my mind’s eye like a slideshow.
“No. Nothing happened.”
I’d never lied to Maddox and Nick before, and I wasn’t sure why I was doing it now. The only explanation that I could come up with was that last night felt like a betrayal. One that I wasn’t even ready to face myself.
