This will be better. I’ll have dinner, keep my mind on other things, and then get it over with as quickly and painlessly as possible. I’m going to make it easy for him. It isn’t his fault that this went off the rails. He never lied to me or led me on. He was honest from the beginning.
No need to make him feel bad for something I did to myself.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Justin
The seat I reserved for Libby near the bench is empty.
It’s empty, which means she’s up in a suite somewhere with a bunch of tech billionaires who are probably circling her curvy little body like sharks, picking out which delectable part of her they’re going to bite first.
I swear to God, if one of them touches her, I’m going to give Laura that fight she’s looking for. We can lock ourselves in her office and scream at each other until she realizes that I’m not the bad guy—she is, for sticking her nosy nose where it isn’t wanted or needed.
Libby never asked to get set up with a tech douchebag. Even before she and I started sleeping together, she had a much different romantic future in mind. She wanted a dork named Roger who graduated head of his class at Oregon State, collects rare coins, and is a member of the Antique Book Preservation Society—some of the many things I learned about him yesterday while googling the competition and deciding there is nothing he has that I don’t have.
I did okay in college, despite an insane practice schedule, I can develop a love for coins if that’s something Libby is into, and I read way more than she gives me credit for.
I read a book last night, in fact. It was a book about how people are completely irrational and do stupid things that they should know better than to do because that’s the way our brains are hardwired by instinct and society. It was enlightening in many ways, both in pinpointing the ways in which corporations are taking advantage of my stupidness with evil advertising strategies, and in figuring out why it took me so long to realize that the way I feel for Libby is so much more than friendship. I’d been brainwashed into thinking love had to be a lightning strike, but now I know it can be like taking off a pair of blinders and seeing what was right in front of you all along.
Hopefully she’ll still be there by the end of the third period.
If she hasn’t been roofied and kidnapped by a tech billionaire.
“What kind of person throws her little sister into a room with twenty single men who have been drinking since the fucking stadium opened?” I pant as Brendan and I tromp down the tunnel toward the locker room, sweaty from an ugly second period in which Brendan took a stick to the face and I got body slammed into the glass by two rookies from the other team. “And don’t tell me again that Libby’s a grown woman. Yes, she’s grown, but she’s also used to dealing with elementary school teachers, crafty people, and the hippie dudes she volunteers with. She has no experience fending off douchebag billionaires.”
“You could be a billionaire someday,” Brendan says. “If you’d get off your ass and talk to my financial advisor. You’re not investing the way you should be.”
“I don’t want to be a fucking billionaire.” I rip off my helmet as we hit the rubber floor and stomp into the locker room. “I just want to fucking talk to Libby so I can quit losing my fucking mind.”
“Language.” Brendan nods to the couches near the television in the corner, where a tiny red ponytail is just visible over the back of the black leather recliner. “Chloe’s here. My sitter called in sick last minute. Laura’s going to come get her before the end of the game so Chloe’s gone before people start showering, but she had some PR stuff to do first.”
“Right. Sorry.” I sniff hard, holding back all the unflattering things I would like to say about my best friend and her fucking temper and her fucking inability to see that Libby is different. Libby isn’t a rebound. Libby is the reason it never worked with anyone else. Chloe loves Laura, almost as much as she loves me, and I’m not ready to give up my place as number one uncle because I badmouthed La in front of her.
“Whatcha making, squirt?” I lean over the back of the chair to see Chloe scribbling madly on a giant pad of paper. The kid is always drawing. She’s a coloring demon, who goes through crayons faster than I go through stick tape.
“Seagulls,” she says, not looking up from the page. “Very scary seagulls, because seagulls are scary as crap and everyone needs to know about it.”
I swallow a laugh as Brendan says in his Dad voice, “Language, Chloe.”
“Scary as heck?” Chloe asks, hopefully.