Page 66 of Ruin Me
I breathed deep and raised my hand to ring the doorbell. Before my finger made contact, it opened, revealing Mal’s surprised face. I stepped back.
“Mal? What are you doing here?”
He glanced behind him, then at me. “Just catching up.” Without another glance at me, he raised his hand. “I’ll see you around, Ife. Madison.” He got into his car and drove away as if his presence was normal.
I turned my attention to the person I was here to see.
Ife stood still, hugging herself with eyes almost as red as mine. Had she poured her heart out about me and her dad? I hada hard time believing she would because I’d never heard of her and Mal having anything deeper than an acquaintanceship.
“Why are you here, Mads? Your theft not complete until you snatch my childhood home, too?”
I swallowed the barb, accepting it as my punishment. I deserved her anger and would endure however she needed to lash out. Her response was my penance from the years I’d coveted her father’s love.
“Can we have this discussion inside? Or would you rather give your neighbors a real-life Telenovela episode?” I glanced around the houses surrounding the Luxe home. Although the street was silent, there were many stay-at-home parents living in this subdivision who would relish witnessing and gossiping about their neighbors’ drama.
Ife stood aside and allowed me to enter.
The last time I was here was after Kent punished me for the first time. Despite his reservations, he’d brought me here to the place he’d shared so much with his wife. I’d tested him then, knowing if he kept his life with Oye to himself, only sharing anecdotes of their lives together, he would never be fully mine. And he’d passed. He’d let me inside, and the memories of my times in their household were full of bittersweet moments. I understood his need to keep her memory enshrined in the house and never asked him to put me before his remembrances again.
However, as the past again enfolded me with sounds of Ife’s and my running through the rooms to admonishments of no running in the house, as we grew older and our antics changed to plotting ways to gain the attention of Ife’s crushes, and the dreams we shared of being in each other’s lives as aunties to each other’s kids, it was Ife’s turn to either slam the door on our history or allow our story to continue.
Please don’t let our relationship end here.
“Please try to understand. Ife, you’re my best friend.”
“Am I?”
“Ife… Why would you question what you mean to me?”
“Then tell me how long you’ve felt this way about my dad? You’ve only been back a few weeks. There’s no way you fell for him in such a short time. So? How long?”
I avoided her gaze, unable to admit I’d been in love with Kent for half my life.
“As I thought,” she sneered, her judgmental gaze stripped me bare and pushed me against a burning pyre. “I was nothing but a convenient tool for you to get close to my father.” Ife’s eyes glimmered.
“What? You can’t believe our years of friendship boil down to me using you. For so much of my life you’ve been my only family. I love you so much.”
“You love me so much you want to replace my mother?” A tear slipped down her cheek as she stared at me with heartbreak in her eyes.
“What? No! I never saw myself as?—”
“No? So, tell me how this works Mads? What do I call you?”
“Mads. Madison. What you’ve always called me. That won’t change.”
“Maybe not… But you can’t expect things to be the same between us. I saw you fucking my dad.”
“I know, and I never wanted you to see us like that. I-I didn’t know how to tell you, and that’s my fault, but you have to believe me when I say you are important to me.”
Ife stared at me in stony silence, the muscle in her jaw ticked the same way Kent’s did. She broke off eye contact to gaze at the ceiling and she took a deep breath. “Do you have a rule with my dad never to discuss me?”
“Well, no…”
“And you expect me to trust you?”
“I don’t understand why you’d think you can’t.”
“You can’t be this naïve Mads.” At my vacant look, she scoffed. “So when Dad and I have a fight, do I become pillow talk? What does the conversation look like? Are all the secrets we’ve shared over the years now currency for you to prove to my dad he can trust you? Do you take my side when I’m with you and his when you’re with him? Do I have to live each day wondering when you’ll spill the things I’ve told you in the past, when I was at my worst or most vulnerable?”