I nodded, and she rubbed her hand over her mouth, momentarily hiding her smile. “I think Dad’s struggling with something else. The way he leaned into Alec makes me think that he might like Alec too.”
I blinked. My eyes were as wide as saucers.Jiminy Cricket. How could she tell that just by looking at him? I knew he liked Alec insofar as they’d connected over their shared quest to make me come as many times as possible. But they’d been together too. They’d touched and made each other come. Was their connection on an emotional level too?
Goodness, I hoped so. At least then I wouldn’t be the only one falling head over heels for them.
But that meant when this ended, as it inevitably would, they’d both be hurting too.
In any event, I had to protect Alec. I wasn’t sure what it’d mean for him if he was outed, so we needed to be careful. Zali was so perceptive. She picked up on the smallest of details, andI knew she’d never tell a soul of her suspicions. But were we too obvious? Who else would be able to tell?
I must have been silent for a beat too long, and Zali pressed her lips together in a forced smile. She waved her hand dismissively and added, “Or I could be completely wrong.”
“I think you could be right,” I whispered. “I kind of hope you are. Monroe deserves someone as good as Alec to love him, but we’re all going to get hurt again.”
nineteen
Cara
Igroaned and rolled over, reaching for my phone. Why was it buzzing? Dad had better not be asking me to do something else for him.
I rubbed my eyes and sighed. I propped myself up on my elbow and unlocked my screen. That couldn’t be right.
Ten thousand notifications on Instagram.
Another fifteen thousand on Facebook.
And fifty thousand on X.
What in the world?
My messages app had hundreds of notifications too.
Something big had happened. What episode of the podcast were we up to?
Jiminy Cricket, if it was the podcast, I needed to check on Monroe and Zali.
I opened up X to check and swallowed. Hard.
There was photo after photo of me sitting on Alec’s lap and others of him kissing me goodnight. Every derogatory word under the sun was used. The hashtag fatgirl was starting to trend along with #golddigger #puckhippo and #cheater too.
Tears sprang to my eyes. They’d not only stabbed me in the chest with a rusty knife, but now they were twisting it. I’d grown up with fat girl jokes—they were a fact of life when you were the biggest kid in your grade—and I’d learned to block most of them out. I’d buried the hurt that those comments brought up every time I thought about them. But I couldn’t block them out in the tens of thousands.
Everyone thought I was a gold digger and was with Alec because of his fame and fortune. It was so far from the truth that it was laughable.
There was no denying that I was practically broke—I didn’t get the best pay as a junior member of the administrative team at Delaware’s Warehouse—but my family were multimillionaires. If I genuinely needed cash, Mum and Dad would give it to me. But I didn’t care about material things. I was happy in my discount store clothes. My little car had seen better days, but it was still reliable enough that I didn’t have to catch the bus.
But none of the insinuations about me even compared to what they’d implied about Alec. The fact that people believed that I wouldn’t want Alec for who he was hurt the most. Why did they think for a second that I couldn’t be crazy about him? He was gorgeous, but more than that, he was sweet and kind. He treated people with respect.
They’d labelled me as a cheater too. They didn’t have any photos of Monroe, but clearly someone had seen me with him earlier in the night. They’d passed judgement on me, not even giving me the chance to explain. I’d never cheat on either of them. How could they think that?
It hurt that they’d call me the same thing that I’d called my father. It was the one thing about him that I detested. Talk about irony.
I suppose I should be thankful that they hadn’t called me a slut.
My vision blurred and I choked back a sob.Was I a slut?Did I deserve everything they threw at me for wanting both of them? Nothing we’d done felt dirty or wrong. It was hot and sexy, but not wrong.
It wasn’t fair. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I didn’t want to drag Monroe and Alec into any kind of bad media attention.
Oh, goodness gracious, what if Alec got in trouble for this? What if it looked bad on the team? Or for him? He didn’t deserve any bad attention for what people were calling me. It didn’t matter that the details were wrong. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t cheating. Perception was everything.
