Sidelined (12 page)

My lips tug up. “Never said that. I said you needed to calm down.”

“Mitch turned up at your door?” Leah cries. “This door?” She jabs a finger toward the front door. “Is this for real?”

Macey nods. “Yeah. And I still haven’t been allowed near the tequila.”

Well, we all know where Macey’s priorities lie.

“Fuck,” Corey mutters.

“What did he say?” Leah demands, her eyes blazing angrily.

“‘Mace, we gotta talk, baby,’” Macey replies.

“And what did you say?”

“I said ‘I’m not your fucking baby, asshole.’ then I slammed the door in his lying face.”

Corey looks at the floor but still glances at me. Laughter is dancing in his eyes, and the shake of his shoulders is testament to how hard he’s trying not to laugh.

“It’s true,” I say through my own grin. “I heard it.”

“Then you will know that I’m perfectly calm and would like my tequila and cookie dough now.” Macey sniffs.

Reluctantly, I let her go, and she makes a second beeline for the tequila. It takes her approximately two seconds to unscrew the cap and tip the bottle up. She takes several mouthfuls before she shivers and puts the bottle down on the table with a clunk.

Leah purses her lips. “And Mitch went? Just like that?”

I scratch behind my ear. “I might have helped him along.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Macey demands, slamming a drawer and brandishing a spoon in my direction.

“Whoa, M.” I step back and hold my hands up. “I may have given him the impression you and I were dating. That’s all.”

“You did what?” she hisses.

“Oh, so you want him to think you’re single so he can come back and piss you off some more, yeah? Because if you want, I could probably find him in five seconds on Facebook and tell him I was screwing around.”

She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “No,” she says on the exhale. “No. I don’t want you to do that. Thank you. For getting rid of him.”

“I didn’t get rid of him, baby.”

She opens her eyes.

“He was already leavin’. I probably just made him think twice about coming back.”

“Well, then thank you for that.” She opens the cookie dough and digs the spoon in.

“You think he’ll come back?” Corey asks.

“Would you come back if it were me and you?” Leah questions.

“Yeah,” he answers. “But I wouldn’t fuck up that royally in the first place. Even if it were me and Macey, and she’s a crazy bitch.”

Macey’s spoon flies in his direction, and he ducks just in time for it to fly past his face and hit the wall.

“See?” Corey looks at me. “Bitches be crazy.”

“Bitches be crazy
and
angry,” Macey snaps. “You value your cock, Jackson? Because believe me, I have a whole book full of ways to remove it from your body slowly and painfully.”

Corey grabs Leah and yanks her in front of his body. I grin. I’d do the same thing.

Leah glances over her shoulder and rolls her eyes. “What are you gonna do, Mace?”

“Right now? Eat cookie dough and drink tequila.”

“And your essay?” I question.

“I’ll tell my professor my dog ate it.”

“They know you don’t have a dog,” Leah reminds her. “And, no, I don’t mean right now. I mean about Fuckwit.”

“Ah.” Macey licks her second spoon clean. “Actually, I’m kind of hoping he won’t come back. Failing that, I was going to resort to one of the dick-removing tortures I cooked up when I kicked him out. Maybe the one with the electric whisk and fork.”

I wince. Fucking. Ouch.

Corey nods toward her as if to say, “You get me?”

I nod quickly. Yeah. She’s crazy—but she has every right to be. He fucked her over royally, and now, to appear at her door without a warning? Hell, right now, I’d hand her the whisk if he came back.

“Well, I see you’re better,” Leah laughs. “Okay, I was in the middle of cooking dinner when Jack called and I need to get back to it. Someone turns into a demon without food.” She elbows Corey. “You gonna be all right?”

Macey nods. “Tequila. Cookie dough.”

“Want me to call Ryann?”

Macey nods again.

“Done. Call you later?”

Another nod.

“Okay.” Leah opens the door and catches my eye. She mouths, “She’s not okay,” before she shuts the door quietly behind her and Corey.

Well, I figured that out for myself, thanks.

I turn to face Macey and watch her. She tucks some hair behind her ear and dips the spoon back into the dough. When she lifts it out with a mound of chocolate chip fluffiness on it, she stares at it so forcefully that I’m kind of wondering if she’s trying to bend the spoon.

She doesn’t move for several seconds. Hell, she isn’t okay. I don’t expect her to be.

Slowly, I walk around the table to her. She brings her eyes up to mine when I take the spoon from her and drop it into the cookie dough tub.

“Why would he come here?” she asks quietly. “It’s been almost a year. We haven’t spoken since I threw him out. What could he want?”

I shake my head and cup the side of her face, my fingertips teasing her hair. “I don’t know, baby. I wish I did.”

She turns her face into my hand and drops her eyes. She stays there for a second before she clasps my wrist and lowers my hand. “Can you go, please? I think I need to be alone right now.”

“The last thing you need right now is to be alone.” I thread my fingers through hers and step closer to her. “Trust me. I know.”

“No, you don’t,” she whispers. “How could you know what this is like?”

“The day I got the call that the Vipers had selected me as their draft pick, I went back to the apartment I shared with my ex to tell her. Know what I found? Her fucking a freshman in our bed.”

Macey jolts at my words and snaps her eyes up. “What?”

“Yeah. I know how it feels, babe. It’s a fucking bitch. My sister is her best friend, and every time she mentions her, I want to throw the nearest heavy object at her. I don’t feel a damn thing for Lucy anymore, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t still piss me off.” I curl my fingers around the back of Macey’s neck. “So you can stand here and tell me to leave, but I ain’t going anywhere. If you want me to sit on the other sofa and not touch you or talk to you all night, then that’s cool. I’ll do that. But I’m not fucking leaving. Got it?”

Her answer is her arm creeping around my waist and her cheek pressing against my chest. I let her hand go and wrap my arm around her back, holding her tight against me.

She’s not shaking anymore. My moment of truth did what it was supposed to—put her in a situation where someone understands how she feels. How fucking destroying that moment is. What she doesn’t know is the full truth, that I wasn’t just heading back to my apartment to tell Lucy I’d been drafted.

I was heading back there with a fucking ring in my pocket so she’d come with me.

Macey curls up on the sofa, staring out the window at the sun crawling up over the L.A. skyline. She barely spoke a word for the rest of the night, instead deciding to throw herself into finishing her essay. She followed it up with four hours of Gilmore Girl reruns, but for the latter, she switched onto the sofa and rested her head on my shoulder, tucking her tiny body against my side.

She didn’t even object when I carried her sleeping body into her room and climbed into her bed with her. She just kind of…lay there.

Now, she’s as quiet as she was then, lost in a world of her own.

“Here.” I pass her a cup of coffee.

“Thank you.” She glances up with a small smile and takes the mug.

“How you feeling?”

“Contemplative.” She sips her coffee, sets it on the table, and rests her chin on her bent knees.

“Baby, from my experience, bad shit happens when you think.”

“Fuck you,” she mutters, her lips pulling up at the side. “No. I’m thinking that maybe I should talk to him.”

I choke on my coffee and thump my chest. “You fuckin’ what?”

She sighs heavily. “I need to talk him, Jack. He said he needed to talk. I’m killing myself over here wondering what he wants. The way I see it, I have two options. I can sit here and send myself to the nearest mental hospital for overthinking or I can pull on some big-girl panties and just find out what he wants to talk about and be done with it.”

I roll my shoulders to loosen the tightness in my muscles brought on by her words. “I don’t like this.”

“It’s not yours to like or not,” she replies defiantly, sitting up straight and turning to fully look at me. “This isn’t about you or you and me and our purely sexual relationship, Jack. This is about me and clearing up the thing that kept me up all night last night. It’s about me getting the answers I never got before.”

My jaw tightens. “He tries shit, you call me. Got it?”

She swings her legs off the sofa. “Not. Your. Problem.”

I lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees, and pin her with my gaze. “Babe, we made a deal. No fucking other people. He tries shit with you and he makes it my fucking problem. Understand that?”

“You know, not all women need looking after. Some of us are perfectly capable of twisting the nuts off a guy ourselves.”

Jesus. She does not fucking get it, does she?

I get up and walk around the coffee table. Setting my hands on her shoulders, I push her back into the sofa cushions and slip my leg between hers. I bend it at the knee, crouching down over her, and grip the top of the sofa.

“Macey, do you understand me?”

“Yes, Jack, I understand you,” she grinds out.

“Fucking fabulous. When are you going to talk to him?”

“Today.”

“How?”

“He texted me late last night. I’ll call him.”

My jaw clenches. “And when you’re done, you come to my house.”

“One: I have no idea where you live. Two: you’re not my fucking father, so quit telling me what to do.”

“I’ll text you my address, so when you’re done, you come to my house,” I repeat, leaning in closer to her.

She stares at me, every part of her absolutely screaming that she’s pissed off with me. Good. I want her to be fucking pissed off. At least it means she’s not numb over that asshole any longer.

“Understand?”

“What, so you can fuck me and tell me what to do in the one place you’re allowed to?” She narrows her eyes.

My lips curve into a smirk, and I drop my hand to rest on her hip, brush my mouth across her ear, and whisper, “Try me.”