Palmer gets in my face so her nose is barely an inch from my own. Her makeup is flawless as usual. She should be giving lessons on contouring. Makeup tutorials might pay better than her lackluster acting career. The ironic part is while Palmer is phenomenal at makeup, she doesn’t need it. Her tone is perfectly even, her skin looks like she has no pores, and her bright baby blue eyes don’t need adornment. They are striking all by themselves. What’s more—Palmer’s platinum, almost white-blond hair is completely natural. Some women were just born in the light.
“You don’t need comfortable. You need a sexy black dress and to get laid.”
I resist rolling my eyes at her ridiculous statement. “Are you offering?”
She scrunches up her nose like I smell. “Maybe…if you shower first.” She peels away a piece of my hair that was glued to my cheek from dried drool. Snorting in laughter, I plant my palm against her forehead and push her away. “I did pick up some of your sweatpants, though, so you’re welcome.”
“I love you.” I give her a half-smile.
Palmer, my savior. My best—no, more accurately, my only—friend in the world right now. It’s not because it’s hard for me to make friends. It’s just hard for me to maintain them. I love to work. I love my job. My job as a brand consultant is very social. I spend a lot of my waking hours behind the scenes, researching and designing, but client meetings are still a huge chunk of my calendar. Virtual or not, it’s still social. I also study people and their behavior all day. Researching what makes people click, buy, and review. My job is creating connections, so my tolerance for social interaction outside of work is relatively low. But Palmer doesn’t let me go into the lonely cave. Every time I bury myself in manic obsessive work, she straps on a harness and dives into the depths to yank me out of the dark pits of my solitary confinement. She forces me to see sunshine.
Mason calls us uncomfortably symbiotic and needy. Maybe he’s right… I need Palmer to tell me I should own at least one pair of shoes that don’t have the word “comfort” in their brand name and Palmer needs me to tell her car wash bikini model is not a real job and will never allow her to plan for retirement.
Mason… Fuck. I even flinch when I say his name in my head.
I nod toward the box. “How’s he doing?”
Palmer spins around and glares at me from her kitchen. She slams two bottles of water on her kitchen countertop. “We don’t care how Mason is doing right now.”
“Palmer.” I narrow my eyes. “How does he look?”
Her hand trails down the taut line of her slim waist and lands on the slight curve of her hip. “Like shit.”
Funny. He dumped me. Shouldn’t he look relieved?
Since I walked out on Mason at the restaurant, we’ve had no contact outside of work. We have an unspoken agreement to stay cordial through work emails. We’re not in the process of onboarding any new clients and are mostly just maintaining current contracts. It doesn’t require a lot of intra-office communication. Outside of a few forwarded messages from clients asking for SEO analytics and metric reports, Mason and I don’t have anything pertinent to say to each other workwise.
But personally, has been an entirely different story.
He’s called a few times, but I don’t answer. He’s texted me to ask how I’m doing, which I find more patronizing than kind. I could block him. But I don’t. I like for the phone to ring so he knows I’m here…just out of reach. He knows I’m staying with Palmer, but he’s smart enough not to come here. Palmer once threatened to chop Mason’s dick off with gardening shears if he ever broke my heart. Who knows what she’s capable of now that we’re living the reality.
“Aves.” Palmer’s tone is drastically serious. Devoid of sass, she says, “It’s time to get up. Let’s go for a walk and get some sunshine. Block him. You’re not this weak.”
I sigh as I smooth back my flyaways and pull my thick hair into a low, side-swept ponytail. “Do you remember the time I had to pick you up from the border because your car was confiscated when you tried to sneak in like fifty bottles of cheap tequila from Tijuana?”
“Yes,” she says in a huff.
“Remember how you didn’t even have money to pay for gas for the return trip?”
She rolls her eyes. “Yeah.”
“And remember the time I had to drive to Las Vegas and pick you up because you got drunk and got locked in what can only be described as some type of stripper birdcage contraption? They wouldn’t let you out until you paid your massive bar tab—that you couldn’t afford?”
She sucks in air against her teeth. “Vaguely.”
“Mhmm, and who covered the bill?”
“You did,” she mumbles.
“And remember when—”
“Oookay, what’s your point, Aves? That I’m a fuckup and you’re way more put together than I am?”
I purse my lips. “No, honey. No.” I press my fingertips against my closed eyelids and feel the cool metal on my ring finger against my cheek. “What I’m trying to say is I’ve had your back through every situation—your highs and lows. I am your biggest cheerleader. I’m the one who told you smuggling cheap tequila over the border was just savvy shopping, that you can’t take your money to your grave so why hold onto it so hard, and that anyone with a blood alcohol level of point-one would of course willingly crawl into a stripper cage—you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”
Her eyes hit the ceiling. “And you believe none of that.”
I blow out a breath and shake my head fervently. “Not a damn word. But I love you. And my job as your best friend is to support you and let you come through things in your own time and your own way. Right now, I need you to do the same.”
Her eyes lock onto the ring on my finger. Why am I still wearing this thing? Maybe I’m pretending. In my mind, I found the damn thing in the cake, wiped it clean, slipped it on my finger to see Mason on his knee, asking me to marry him…not dumping me.
“Did he actually ask you?”
“What?” I squint at her odd question.
“You’re wearing the ring. He said he didn’t officially ask you…to marry him.”
What a freaking odd thing to say. “You guys talked about it?”
I sent Palmer to get me some clothes and toiletries. I didn’t realize she’d sit down to have a heart-to-heart with Mason.
“No.” She shrugs. “Briefly,” she adds. “Obviously, we crossed paths and as I was leaving, I asked him why the hell he would propose to you, just to break up with you five seconds later. When he said he didn’t ask, I asked if he wanted the ring back…”
I narrow my eyes at her. That’s not your place to ask, Palmer. “He told me to keep it.”
“Odd.”
“Indeed. I now own a guilty conscience, non-engagement ring.” Which is worse than no ring at all. I stare at my finger, knowing I’m going to need a vat of Vaseline to get this off. Why would Mason buy this in a ring size too small? Maybe it was wishful thinking. Maybe he thought a proposal would shrink me and by some miracle I’d squeeze into his standards. The ass.