Page 126 of Truck Me
“Char. This is what you’ve been waiting for. Read it.”
“I know. But what if she’s his? How will that work? Am I supposed to just be with him, marry him, have kids with him, all the while raising my niece as what … Her aunt? Her stepmom? What would our kids be to her? Siblings and cousins? That’s so fucked up.”
She narrows her eyes and points the spatula at me. “Tell me again that you don’t love him.”
“Sierra! You’re not helping.”
She takes the skillet off the stovetop and slides the sandwich on a plate, then she walks around the counter and pulls me into a hug. “Listen to yourself. If you’re thinking about all those things, then you definitely love him.”
I quickly shake my head, refusing to hear her words. “No. It was just really great sex.”
“Oh, really?” She leans back and holds me at arm’s length. “So you won’t mind if I take him for a ride, then?”
I glare at my friend.
She laughs. “That’s what I thought.”
“Stop it. I know what you’re trying to do. I can’t think about my feelings for him. It’s too complicated.”
“Babe, life is complicated. Nothing is ever going to change that. Tell me something. Why exactly are you so upset with him?”
My eyes widen and my jaw drops. “Are you serious? He lied to me.”
She wrinkles her nose. “But did he? It’s not like you asked him about Carol. Hey, Mr. Sexy Pants, before we bang, did you by chance bang my sister and knock her up?”
“I didn’t know I needed to ask that question.”
“Now put yourself in his shoes. This is a secret he’s kept for over ten years. He’s lived with the knowledge that he may or may not be Rayne’s father. I don’t know why he kept it a secret for so long—that part is kind of shitty—but the more time that passes, the harder it becomes to talk about the decisions we make. Especially when they’re wrong.”
“Are you defending him?”
“No, not at all. Just trying to get you to see the other side of this. If you can at least see where he’s coming from, maybe you two can move past this. But …” she puts emphasis on the T, “that will require you to actually talk to him.”
“Talking to him means seeing him. I don’t know if I can see him just yet without completely falling apart.”
She raises a brow as she walks around the counter to finish preparing our grilled sandwiches. “Because you really care about him.”
“Of course I care. I don’t have sex with men I don’t care about.”
“Okay, new tactic.” She rests her elbows on the table and leans forward. “Let’s go back to December. Do you remember what you said to me the day after Brad humiliated you?”
I groan and cover my face with my hands. “Oh God. I was such an idiot.”
“Yeah,” she says in a tone that confirms she agrees with my assessment. “Brad, a total douche of a human being, refused your proposal by publicly announcing he was having an affair with one of your clients. He admitted to cheating on you for over two years.”
She pauses to take a drink of wine. “The next day, you were frantically trying to figure out how to win him back, how to fix this mess so you two could get back to the life you were planning. It took me three hours—three hours—to talk you off that ledge. You were ready to forgive that asshole for what he did to you, and yet you can’t have one conversation with Garret? A man who publicly claimed you as his when the douche showed up and tried to wiggle his way back into your life. And all because of an omission to something that happened over ten years ago before you and he were even a thing.”
I snatch her wine glass from her and down the rest of it. “When you say it like that, you make me sound like an awful person.”
“I didn’t say that.” She grabs the bottle of wine and refills her glass and pours me one of my own. “You’re a great person, Char. One of the best people I know.”
I take the wine glass from her and take a more reasonable sip. “What do I do? I’m so confused.”
“Let me ask you this. How would you feel if Garret started dating someone else?”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“But what if he did?”