Page 109 of Faking It
“You are going to respond to those emails, aren’t you?”
I close my eyes. “Of course, Mom. Just . . . I need a few days, okay?” My voice breaks and hell if that wasn’t a beacon calling her to come sit on the couch and comfort me.
She snuggles in beside me and smooths down the back of my hair. “Mija—”
“I’m fine.” I wipe the lone tear away that I let escape.
“This is my fault you’re hurting. I pushed you to tell him. I fostered this with my silly notions. I should have kept my mouth shut.”
“It’s not your fault. I knew going into it how he felt, I was just a stupid girl and let my emotions get the best of me.”
“He’ll come around, mija. The way he looked at you in the videos from the party . . . he’ll come around.” I smile at her but don’t believe it. “Just remember this, if you leaving doesn’t affect him, then in truth, your time with him never really mattered in the first place.”
“Yeah. It still sucks.”
“It does.” She pats my head and then kisses the top of my head before heading back to her place and leaving me in silence.
With a deep sigh and an exhaustion so bone deep I just want to sleep for days, but know when I close my eyes I’ll see the look on his face when I walked away, I study the text on my phone:
Congrats on the successful launch. I’ve been following it from home and couldn’t be more proud to have been a part of it with you. Thank you for the experience, for the memories it provided, and my apologies on how I left things. I was caught up in the moment, caught up in the little world we’d lived in together, and now that I’ve stepped outside of it, I know that it would have never worked between us.
The blinking cursor at the end taunts me to push send.
To stack another lie on top of a relationship that was fostered from them.
I take a deep breath.
Sigh.
And push send.
“I FUCKED THIS UP, SMUDGE.”
I look back down at the text for what feels like the hundredth time. She fucking wrote me off just like that?
Smudge looks up at me as drool hangs from his mouth as if to say, “It’s been a week and the text hasn’t changed, so why the hell are you still looking at it?”
Good question.
I lean back in my chair, drop my phone on the table, and pick up my cup of coffee. The coffee house is packed. People coming in and rushing out, already late for their meetings. At a table in the corner is a man on his laptop, and ironically, he has SoulM8 up on his screen. No one else would know it by the discrete layout we set up, but I notice it. The little girl a table to the right of me is drinking her hot chocolate while her mom snuggles up against her dad, and I’m just about to look away when she slurps the end of the contents with her straw.
Slurps with her straw.
Harlow is fucking everywhere even when I don’t want her to be.
“Love is pretty damn fantastic isn’t it?” Robert says when he takes his seat across from me, his newly refilled cup in his hand, and lifts a chin in the direction of the family I was just looking at.
“It is,” I murmur in response.
“That’s it? It is? Nothing more to add than that?”
“What’s that supposed to mean, mate?”
“You miss her don’t you?”
It takes me a sharp second to realize what he just said and hold back my honest response—hell yes, I do—and collect myself enough to meet his eyes without giving my shock away.
“What’s that?” I ask to cover.
