“Because I’m your friend, Sunny. Nothing will ever change that. If you need to bitch about something, even if that something is me, I’ll be that person for you.”
“What if I go back to Sterling?”
My entire body stills. Not a fucking chance. I know she’s goading me. And it’s working. “No.”
“You think you can just waltz in, tell me you’re”—her hands form sarcastic air quotes as she carries on—“kind of interested mere weeks after I was meant to get married, and I’m going to take your hand and skip off into the sunset? After these past couple of weeks, I must seem really stupid to you, but I’m not that stupid.”
The door opens, and she surges out of the elevator and down the carpeted hallway, irritation wafting off of her. She laughs. Actually laughs.
Because of course she does. Only she would laugh at a moment like this.
“This is insane,” she mutters as she turns the corner and finds our room. One swipe of the key and she’s into the space, tossing her bag onto a chair. She storms toward the windows where she stands with her hands on her hips, silhouetted by the whiteout on the opposite side of the glass.
“You’re not going back to him.”
She shrugs nonchalantly. “Maybe I will. You don’t tell me what to do, Jasper.”
Not yet. But I will.
“You’re not.”
She spins, her voice cutting across the room like she’s thrown a dart right at my chest. “And why not?”
“Because he sucks the life out of you!” She rears back, clearly shocked by the volume of my voice. “And I want to breathe it back in.”
Her laugh this time is not at all amused. “Years, Jasper. Years. For years I have been the little cousin, the little sister, the good friend. For years I have seen you. Waited for you every summer. Watched you go on dates with women who weren’t me—who would never be me. I was sick over you. And then I came to terms with what we were. I accepted I would always want you and you would never want me back. I convinced myself that sometimes the greatest loves of our lives will be our closest friends. And I was okay with that.”
My stomach drops, my chest seizes, and nausea roils.
“I got really fucking comfortable in my head where I could want you that way but had the safety of knowing you didn’t want me back. And now? You just change your mind? Willy-nilly? When emotions are already running high for us both? This is insane.”
“I didn’t just change my mind.” I dread what I’m about to tell her. She’s already angry with her dad, and I loathe the thought of being the one to make her hate him. Because hearing what she’s just told me, I know this will hurt her.
“Make this make sense for me, then!”
My voice drops, and so do my eyes. “It was your dad.”
“What?”
I pry at the edges of my cap, pulling the brim down to shield myself. “It was the fall you got a spot with your company. Finally went pro. Got a role in The Nutcracker. I came to help you move into your new condo downtown. You were eighteen, and I was twenty-four.”
“I remember.” Her voice is quiet, hollowed-out sounding.
“We had fun setting everything up.”
She nods. “We did.”
“I had secured a spot on the Grizzlies. Clawed my way up off the farm team.”
“I remember,” she repeats.
“Everything was going so well for both of us. I was so happy for you. So excited to see you on stage. To have a friend from back home in the city with me.”
Her eyes are shiny now.
“But your dad found me leaving your place.” I swallow, staring down at my hands, arms limp at my sides before crossing them and slipping them beneath each other like a shield. “He threatened to pull strings with his friend who owns the team and have me cut from the roster if I ever crossed that line with you. He told me to stay far away from you. That he never wanted to see me in your presence alone again.”
She still says nothing. Her baby blues bore into me with unnerving intensity.
“You were still a kid to me back then. I really didn’t think of our relationship that way, but he scared me all the same. Sloane, you have to understand, I had nothing to my name except being good at hockey. Being really fucking good at hockey. Good enough to pull myself out of the gutter I got left in. And your dad? He’s just powerful and connected enough to follow through on his threats.”
Her bottom lip wobbles and her eyes blink. “But why would he want you to stay away from me?”
My face scrunches, and I wipe a hand over my stubble, hearing the rasp in my ears. “You really can’t guess, Sloane? It’s because I’m not one of you. I’m from, I believe he called it ‘the wrong side of the tracks.’ I don’t take six figure trips to hunt lions or drive a Maybach. I came from nothing and made something of myself by working my ass off and putting on a show for the masses. I’m beholden to men like your father, but I’ll never be one of them. I’m an Eaton at heart. A small town boy. And I always will be, no matter how many zeroes are on my paycheck. And to be frank, I’m happy with that.”
“But I don’t care about your paycheck. I never have.” Her voice is so small, so brittle.
I sigh and reach up to squeeze at my brim, wanting to comfort her but not wanting to overstep either. “I know you don’t. But this is what I’ve been trying to tell you all along. He doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t care that Sterling is a shit match for you. He doesn’t care about what you want. He cares about what he needs. He couldn’t risk me or you ruining his plans or his reputation with my dirty upbringing and fucked-up family dynamic. And I was too young and too desperate to defy him. I missed your first professional ballet on the big stage because I was scared. I kept you in the friend zone for years after because I was scared.”
She stays perfectly still. The shiny veneer she’s assigned to her father all these years has cracked, and a tear spills down her cheek. A perfect droplet rolling over her pale skin, the reality of his manipulations seeping out in a slow, devastated trickle.
That frustration surges up in me at the sight, and I say what I’ve been wanting to say to her for god knows how long. “Times have changed, Sloane. I’m not scared anymore. You’re not my fucking friend. You’re just mine.”
20
Sloane
Dad: Sloane. Answer this fucking phone. NOW. You’re done disrespecting me. And if you’re off gallivanting with that homeless orphan, there will be consequences.
I dip my face into the warm water, hoping it will make the tears on my cheeks blend in. The steam from Blisswater hot spring wafts up around me while fat white snowflakes fall down.
I sit on the tiled bench, submerged, and I watch. The instant they contact the top of the water, they melt away into nothing.
I feel alarmingly kindred with them. Everything I thought I knew about my life has melted away into nothing in the span of a five-minute conversation.
Worst of all, I’m angry with myself for not seeing it. Because the more I think about it, the more I think I’ve been willfully ignorant concerning my father.
What little girl wants to think her dad wouldn’t have her best interests at heart? I wasn’t subtle about my crush in the early days. He and my mom would have known, they’d have seen it.