“I’ll never forgive him,” he said. “For ruining your special day.”
She leaned back against the wall. “I thought that I’d been through enough. Honestly.”
“Me too.”
“I want to leave,” she said.
“I’ll take you home.”
“I don’t want to go home. Because he’s there. He’s at my house clearing out all of his stuff. I told him that I didn’t want to see him again. So he needs to get it all now, because whatever else is there... I was going to throw it away.”
“Then you’re coming home with me. You can stay the night.”
“Thank you. What about the guests?”
“Daughtry is taking care of it. We’re going to go up the back, and you don’t have to see anybody. I’ve got you, Rue.”
Because what was the point of being a disreputable best friend if you didn’t use your skills sneaking out the back when your good-girl best friend was in need? There was no point.
He’d wanted to be good for her today. But the thing about him and Rue was that they complemented each other. So if right now she needed him to be bad, that was what he would do.
When Rue woke up, she couldn’t figure out where she was. The ceiling was unfamiliar, and the bedsheets were scratchy. It wasn’t her house, with her gloriously high-thread-count sheets. It certainly wasn’t the cute B&B that she had intended to go to with Asher for their wedding night.
Asher.
She sat bolt upright.The wedding. The wedding hadn’t happened. The wedding had been called off. For a solid thirty seconds she sat there in the bed she hadn’t identified yet, wondering if that had been a dream. Wondering if today was actually the wedding day. Willing it to be.
But slowly, she was able to focus on the rest of the room. Slowly, she was coming to terms with what day it actually was. And...
She was at Justice’s house. In his spare room.
Sleeping on a little twin bed, the dubious sheets a testament to his bachelorhood.
She groaned, and put her head in her hands. She had cried last night until her eyes were sandpaper. Yeah. Now she remembered everything. Justice had taken her home, Arizona had brought over some clothes, she had changed and then she had gone into the bedroom and curled up in this bed. She had slept fitfully at first, and then like she had been renderedunconscious. Which was why she was so disoriented now. She looked at the basic digital clock on the nightstand. It was ten thirty in the morning. She couldn’t remember the last time she had slept in that late.
And she still felt exhausted. All the way down to her bones.
She grabbed her phone. It had... exploded. Everyone who had known her well enough to be invited to the wedding—clients from the yarn store, distant cousins, other local shop owners—had texted her to find out if she was okay. She really couldn’t deal with it. Not right now.
She always answered her texts. She judged Justice and his eternal red bubble that sat on his text window. The man had 150 unread texts. What kind of monster had that many unread texts? But today, she realized she was going to be that monster.
There was one text that she saw that she felt too curious to ignore. Or maybecuriositywas the wrong word. It was just grim. But...
She touched Asher’s name and opened it up.
Everything is cleared from the house. I wish that we could talk. I love you. And the idea that I’m not going to see you again kills me. But I understand. I do.
All she could do was stare at it. If he loved her, how had he been able to have sex with somebody else? Or even more importantly, how could that have felt so important in the moment? How could it have felt soessential? If she was really the perfect woman for him then why had it been so much more important for him to have an orgasm than to spend his life with her?
She rolled out of bed, and looked at herself in the mirror. She was an absolute nightmare. Her hair was a rat’s nest, her eyes were swollen nearly shut. Her misery was bleeding out of her pores.
Asher didn’t deserve for her to feel this level of heartbreak. But she had loved him, or she wouldn’t have been intending to marry him in the first place. She ground her back teeth together and opened up the bedroom door. She heard footsteps, and then she made her way into the kitchen, where she saw Justice, shirtless and wearing low-slung jeans and no shoes, taking the carafe off the coffeemaker and holding it beneath the spigot.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Nothing is good,” she said.
“Okay. How awful is today?”
