“Yeah, well, I guess I just didn’t anticipate the cat being let out of the bag quite so . . . I don’t know—”
“Pornographically?” Elle supplied. “I mean, from the sound of it, good porn. The kind you have to pay for and where you know they’re actually treating the actors nice, you know? Quality stuff.” Elle cringed. “Not that we were listening, ew, it was just difficult to tune out. But we tried. Really hard. We, um, turned the TV on really loud.” Elle smiled sweetly. “But kudos, Mar. It sounded like you guys were having an A-plus time.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ.” Margot buried her face in her hands and groaned. “Kill me now.”
Elle bumped her with her hip and laughed. “Lighten up. Don’t worry, it’s not like Darcy and I are going to say anything. Clearly, this isn’t how you wanted anyone to find out about . . .”
Margot peeked through her fingers as Elle trailed off, brows lifting as she waited for Margot to fill in the blanks.
Margot lowered her hands from her face and sighed deeply, the sound coming from what felt like all the way down in her bones. “I don’t know what I’m doing, Elle. But I’m in so far over my head, it’s not even funny.”
Elle’s smile slipped. “Okay, not laughing anymore. Why don’t you start from the beginning?”
Margot glared.
“The beginning that makes the most sense to you,” Elle clarified.
Margot took a deep breath and just . . . let it all pour out.
“Like I said, Olivia and I were friends. We were best friends. Wherever she went, I was sure to follow. If you were looking for her, you’d find me.” She bit her lip. “I mean, there was one summer where Liv practically moved in with us, my family. I had mono and she skipped cheer camp and gave up her spot on the varsity squad just so I wouldn’t be alone.”
Elle smiled, and if Margot wasn’t mistaken, it was a touch sad. Grim. Expectant. Leave it to Elle to read between the lines, to hear what Margot wasn’t saying. “Sounds like you two were really close.”
Margot scratched her forehead. “Yeah, you could—you could say that.” She swallowed, the lump in her throat growing. “It doesn’t really take a genius to see where this is going. At some point—I don’t know exactly when, because whoever knows exactly when these things begin—I fell for her. Hard. I was ridiculously, stupidly, ass-over-heels in love with her, and I didn’t realize it until she started dating someone else. Brad. He was an ass.” She rolled her eyes. “Not just because he was dating her and I wasn’t.”
Elle nodded and, to her credit, waited quietly for Margot to go on.
“It was fine. I—okay, no. That’s a lie. It sucked. There were copious amounts of teenage angst, and lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling and listening to Ingrid Michaelson sing about fragile hearts, and journaling. So much journaling.” She ducked her head and scoffed out a laugh. “I’m sure I filled several diaries up with entries about how painfully unfair my life was.”
She’d yearned, pined, burned, perished. If it sounded painful and emotionally fraught, Margot had probably been there, done that.
Elle nibbled on her bottom lip. “Did you ever say anything?”
“Are you serious?” Margot snorted. “Of course not. Olivia was with Brad, and I didn’t want to ruin our friendship, so I kept my mouth shut.” Her lips twisted. “I managed to mess everything up without ever saying a thing.”
Margot glared at that atrocious jacket the color of pea soup. “Spring break senior year. Brad and Olivia were in one of the many off phases of their on-again-off-again relationship. He’d broken up with her that time. I did what I always did and came over with junk food and old movies and was prepared to be the shoulder Liv needed to cry on. But it didn’t happen like that.” Her mouth had gone dry, tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth. She swallowed hard, trying to generate some moisture. “Liv’s dad was away on some trip with his friends. We had the house to ourselves. Suddenly we were breaking out a bottle of bottom-shelf vodka, and next thing I knew”—her voice cracked—“she was kissing me.”
Elle squeezed her arm.
“It was, um, everything I wanted right there, and I just . . . I rolled with it. I didn’t ask questions. I mean, my best friend who I was stupidly in love with was kissing me, and I was eighteen and perpetually horny; what was there to question?” She laughed. To be that young and stupid. “One thing led to another, and we had sex. A lot of sex. I stayed the whole week at her house and we weren’t—we weren’t drunk the whole time. After that first day, we didn’t touch the vodka. But we didn’t really talk about it, either? I mean, we talked. It wasn’t like a constant sex marathon.”