Pitch Perfect(47)

“And if I don’t?”

“Well, if you don’t, perhaps you should start imagining a future somewhere else.”





Chapter Twenty-Three

Never were truer words spoken than “breaking up is hard to do.”

Emmy had avoided Simon after the game, bypassing the areas most commonly populated by the press. She’d made sure all the boys were stretched out and cooled down before she made a break for it. Jasper had known something was up the entire time, nagging her with questions and following her around while she gathered her things. The man was too aware of her quirks. It made it impossible for her to hide anything from him.

So, instead, she hid.

Avoiding her work partner was a lot trickier than avoiding her boyfriend, but she managed to escape the park in one piece. It wasn’t that she was chickening out. Emmy had every intention of breaking up with Simon before the evening was over. But she wanted to avoid the awkwardness of doing it on her home soil. The stadium was where she spent her days and was more a home to her than her apartment would ever be. The last thing she wanted was the memory of her breakup to haunt the sacred walls of a ballpark.

You don’t do unhappy things within a stone’s throw of a ball diamond. It was an invitation for disaster.

She drove for over an hour, doing a full loop from downtown San Francisco to Oakland and back over the Golden Gate, her FasTrak toll pass beeping each time she went through an express check, reminding her that this avoidance was costing her. Time, in this case, literally was money.

The time window between evening and late night was an ideal moment for city driving. People weren’t out and about for dinner and movies anymore, and the game had long since ended, but the party crowd hadn’t yet gotten going. The streets were easy to navigate, and traffic was negligible. It meant the trip from Golden Gate Park to Simon’s downtown hotel took next to no time, and soon Emmy was confronted with the reality that she’d have to do what she’d promised herself she’d do.

For someone who was as self-motivated as Emmy, she was having a hell of a time pushing herself to Simon’s door.

When she got off the elevator on his floor, she paced in front of his door for a full minute, psyching herself up.

“Simon,” she said to herself. “We’ve been good together, but maybe it’s time we think about being good apart.” Grimacing at how pathetic it sounded even to her, she gritted her teeth and started again. “I think we’ve both known for a while now we can’t continue on with things the way they are.” She raised both brows and chewed on the inside of her cheek. Not bad.

Was there really any good way to do it? Probably not, but there had to be a slightly less crappy way than saying, Fuck it, I’m done. He hadn’t been bad to her. He wasn’t a bad boyfriend.

Emmy sighed. She was the bad guy here, and she knew it. Might as well show her true colors and get the deed over with.

She strode up to 1805 and was about to knock when the interior lock jostled and the door opened. Cassandra Dano was in the process of having a hearty laugh about something and was actually tossing her long blonde hair. Tossing it, like she was some sort of ’80s video vixen. The laughter stopped dead when she saw Emmy standing in the doorway.

“Oh,” the anchor said, clearly not expecting anyone to be in her way. “Hi.”

Emmy stared back. Cassandra’s hair looked more tousled than the usual controlled waves she sported on camera, and there was a faint glow in her cheeks. She appeared radiant, and it pissed Emmy off in a way she couldn’t have imagined.

Rather than a polite greeting, Emmy asked, “What are you doing here?”

“I was, uh… I mean, Simon and I were…”

“Cass, who are you talking to?” Simon’s voice preceded him around the corner, and then he appeared, his dress shirt unbuttoned and his own blond coif rumpled.

“It’s Emmy,” Cassandra informed him.

Emmy waited in the hallway, staring at the woman who was between her and her boyfriend, trying to come up with any logical reason why Cassandra would be in Simon’s room after eleven o’clock at night.

“Emmy,” Simon said.

“Why do you seem surprised to see me?” Emmy asked. “I told you I was coming by after the game.”

Simon was buttoning his cuffs, and each gesture he made caused Emmy’s frustration to increase. “The game ended over an hour ago.”

“I had things to do.”

“I went looking for you. Jasper said you’d left.”

“So because I didn’t come over right after the game you decided to settle for the next best thing?” Emmy glowered at Cassandra, and the skinny newscaster flushed guiltily.