She holds her hand up and wiggles her fingers. “Thank you! It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I waited seven years for this idiot to propose.”
Casen narrows his eyes playfully. “Hey, I got around to it, didn’t I?”
“You did,” she laughs, drawing his arm over the front of her body.
“How did you two meet?”
“We met in high school, but we hated each other at first,” Casen answers.
Josie nods in agreement. “I couldn’t stand him. We were classmates in history, and he cheated off my final. When the teacher found our answers to be the exact same, they failed both of us and had us attend detention for an entire month. All of it went on our permanent record. Casen refused to admit he cheated. And because of this, we both had to retake the class. We were at each other’s throats for a while before the tension turned into something salvageable. And here we are, seven years later.” She punctuates the end of her story with a loved-up nuzzle to his chest.
I can’t imagine spending seven years of my life with another person. You would know everything about them by that point. I like the stability of that, though. They’re a few of the lucky ones to have found their lifelong partner early. “Wow, that sounds like a roller coaster.”
“It was, but it was worth every turn,” Josie confesses, a look of longing drifting over her features.
“It sounds like—”
The sight of a girl jockeying her way through a crowd of people halts my sentence. Her slender body hurtles toward us, and her cat-like eyes do a foxtrot around the group before landing on Hayes.
“Hayes, can we talk?”
Who is this girl? And how does she know Hayes?
She has flawless, golden skin, a button nose, and pink lips that look like they’ve been permanently bee-stung. Her bone structure had to have been sculpted by an artist. She’s wearing a satiny-looking pink slip, and a small, gold necklace—which I can only assume costs more than the down payment of my entire apartment—rests on her chest. Her small boobs are perfectly proportioned to her lean body. She looks like a model. Actually, she looks like one of those super clean girls that you never imagine ever having to poop. Like Kendall Jenner.
Hayes’ voice tips into the realm of shock. “Now?”
“Now.” She practically snaps at him, but it’s juxtaposed by a polite smile that has a hundred watts of power behind it.
His throat rolls with a gulp, and he mouths a sorry before following the girl into a more private section of the restaurant.
I do my best to ignore the envy coming to a boiling point inside of me, watching as her nightshade, pin-straight hair disappears among the sea of people.
“Who was that?” I ask Casen, anxiety using my internal organs as its own punching bag.
Casen scratches at his beard. “Uh, I think her name is Sienna. She’s one of our sponsor’s daughters.”
Sponsor? Daughter? Sponsor’s daughter?
Oh my God. Could my dad have been telling the truth?
23
A BLAST FROM THE NOT-SO-DISTANT PAST
HAYES
“Hayes.” The glower on Sienna’s face is harrowing enough to dry up my throat.
Shit. I was dumber than I thought to believe I could avoid her the entire night. Of course she’d be here. Of course she’d want to talk to me. Of course my mistake would come back to bite me in the ass. And now Aeris is going to have so many questions.
“Sienna. I…uh, hi,” I stammer, my fingers reaching up to loosen my tie, the room suddenly feeling a hundred degrees hotter.
“So that was it? You were just going to ghost me?” she exclaims, her tone toeing between hurt and anger.
In hindsight, I should’ve been upfront with her about the nature of our fling, but a part of me was worried that she’d spill to her father and he’d pull his sponsor.
I suck down a lungful of air as regret sinks like stones in my stomach. “I’m sorry, Sienna. I thought it was obvious I wasn’t looking for anything serious.”
It’s a weak argument, I’m aware. I don’t really know what else to say to her right now.
Wisps of sadness fall over her face. “You used me, Hayes.”
“I’m really sorry. It was never my intention to make you feel that way.” A dagger slips between my ribs at the implication of her words.
“I’m not…mad at you. I’m just disappointed.”
That makes two of us.
I go to open my mouth, but nothing seems to come out. Sienna’s a sweet girl. She didn’t deserve to get caught in the crossfire.
“Your new girl is beautiful,” she says, offering me the smallest of smiles. “She’s really lucky.”
“And the next guy who meets you will be just as lucky,” I tell her, my guilt defusing just a little as her cheeks pinken.
She turns away from me, but not before she adds over her shoulder, “I’m not going to tell my father, by the way.”
“You’re not?”
“I know how much his sponsorship means to the team. I’m not going to let some hurt feelings get in the way of things. You never promised we were going to form any kind of relationship. It was wishful thinking on my part.”
My eyes latch onto her teary ones, and my arms bracket her in a hug. “It wasn’t wishful thinking. If things were different, I’d be happy to see things through with you. But…” My words are muffled into the back of her dress.
She pulls away with a sniff. “But you really like that girl.”
My vocal cords chafe together, and the organ in my chest feels like it’s two beats away from caving in completely. “I do. I really like her.”
Sienna wipes away an unbidden tear on her cheek. “I wish you both the best. Just promise me something, Hayes.”
“What?” I ask.
“Promise me you’ll be honest with her. Girls are simple. All we want is honesty.”
“I promise,” I respond, hating how easy the lies are starting to become.
24
FOOL ME ONCE, FOOL ME TWICE
AERIS
“Why do you look constipated?” Lila asks me, grabbing a champagne flute off one of the waiter’s trays and downing it in a single gulp.
“I don’t look…constipated,” I grumble. I’m so tense that my muscles feel like they’ve been brutally bent out of shape.
“Yes, you do. Spill.”
“Hayes just got swept away by the most stunning girl in existence. Like, she won the genetic lottery. Like, her face is so symmetrical that she had to have been created in a lab for those proportions to work.”
Lila hums, smoothing out the front of her dress. She’s wearing a violet dress that emphasizes her hourglass figure, with a high slit showing off her enviable legs.
“Do you think something happened between them?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I reply. The way that girl looked at Hayes will be forever branded into my memory. There was definitely some lust in there. And anger.
Hayes and I weren’t exclusively together until weeks after we started seeing each other. He could’ve very well gotten his fix with some other girls when he was talking to me. I can’t be mad at him for that. He never promised me anything. He was a free agent at that time. I’m jealous as fuck, but I can’t be angry with him.