Page 21 of Edged
I pulled open the door and stepped into the hallway, putting space between us without looking back. Rob trailed me through the club and into the parking lot where I searched out the ridiculous shine on his Maserati and waited for him to unlock the doors.
Thankfully, he let me sulk in my own misery the whole drive to his house, and he didn’t even push me for answers until I was stretched out on a chaise lounge in his back yard with a tumbler of whiskey in my hand. His house was dark, save for the kitchen light, and the yard sparkled a brilliant sapphire blue from the reflections in his pool.
“How’s the whiskey?” he finally asked after I’d drank half the glass.
“Unfortunately, it’s not enough to erase the shittiest thing I’ve ever done, but not for lack of trying.” I gave the glass a little shake, enjoying the calm way the ice clanked against the edges before resettling in the bottom.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
I scoffed. “Do I have a choice?”
“Always,” Rob answered quickly. He stretched out and kicked my ankle with the toe of his brown oxford.
The night air was quiet and warm, another perk of living as deep in the valley as Rob did. I toed off my boots and finagled my feet out of my socks, trying to find the easiest place to start. The place to start that didn’t make me sound like the absolute piece of shit I was.
“Did you want to go in?” he asked, toeing off his shoes and kicking them onto the concrete pool deck.
“In the pool?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t have a bathing suit,” I reminded him.
“Are you wearing underwear?”
Chuckling, I blinked slowly, turning my eyes toward the sky. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Honestly, not at all.”
“Another time,” I told him. “I think if I went in and told you this story, I’d be likely to drown myself.”
“I’m sure whatever it is, it isn’t that bad,” he said, sipping at his drink and staring off toward the tree line on the far edge of his yard.
“When I was in college, I dated this girl. Mandy.”
“College when?” Rob asked.
“Bachelor’s degree.” I cleared my throat, washing away the itchiness with some whiskey. “I was twenty when I graduated.”
“Alright. Mandy.”
“She was my best friend’s older sister.”
“How trite,” Rob teased.
If only that had been the case.
“The night I graduated, we were supposed to…you know.”
“Fuck,” he supplied.
“For the first time.”
Rob made a knowing sound in the back of his throat and I took another drink of whiskey.
“We were close to it, but she told me Owen, her brother and my friend, was upset about things with me and her. And I think, in hindsight, I’d known that all along. Maybe not at first, but after things had started to get more serious with her, things got weirder between me and him.”
I paused, the memories somehow more painful when I gave them voice.
