The Pact(86)
He continues, “She’s so fucking good in bed. Back then, and recently too.”
“W-what?” My lungs empty.
He gives me a grin. It’s smug and I want to punch it off his god damn face. “Yeah. Her twenty-ninth birthday. Remember when you were in the hospital with Nadine?”
Yes. Yes. I do.
“Well, I didn’t want Steph to spend her birthday alone. So I went down to her shop. Things got a bit carried away. We ended up having sex right there in her store. How about that, huh?”
Black spots are appearing in my vision. Everything he said sounds like it’s coming from a dream, some nightmare. It’s not real. Stephanie did not sleep with James on her twenty-ninth birthday.
“Shocked,” James comments. “I rarely get to shock the great Linden McGregor. This must be a first for me.” He gives me a rather wicked smile and goes on. “Anyway, the sex was amazing. You know, that whole I-still-want-you-and-I-must-have-you. It got pretty fucking messy. Food everywhere, spilled drinks. Just took her right there on the floor, on her hands and knees and she was fucking loving it, Linden. She was fucking loving it.”
All I feel is rage. Red hot, sticky flames of rage. Angry, uncontrollable, hate-seeking rage just burning inside of me, eating away. I’m going to do something stupid, I know it, I know it. I can’t help it.
He’s my best friend and I want to kill him
Just fucking kill him.
But somehow I swallow down my fury, gulp it, until it burns my throat and I plaster on a smile. “Sounds pretty cool.” I breathe in, breathe out. “Just that one time?”
His eyes drop with disappointment. “Yeah.” The rage slips from me, slightly. “But what it made me realize is that I’m still not over her.”
“That’s a long time to be pining over your best friend,” I tell him, then busy myself with the rest of my juice. I’m trying to think how I should act about this, how he expects me to. Does the Linden he thinks I am – the one that sees Stephanie as only a friend – does he care about this scenario at all?
I guess he would a little.
“Well, what are you going to do about it?” I ask. “You broke up with Penny but as long as you’re just harboring these feelings, it’s never going to go anywhere. Aren’t you worried about messing up the friendship? Do you know if she feels the same way about you? Because, I don’t know man…she’s got a pretty full life at the moment and from my end, she doesn’t really seem to think of you that way. No offense or anything.”
A cold, calculating gleam comes into James eyes as he looks up at me. “Typical Linden.”
“Typical Linden?” I repeat.
He taps his fingers on the table. “You know what really pissed me off? When you made that pact with her. That stupid shitty little pact.”
“Why would that piss you off?”
He gives me a look. “Obviously you know why now. But there you go, telling the girl that I’m in love with, my ex-girlfriend, and our friend, that you’ll marry her if you’re both single when you turn thirty.”
“I didn’t know you were in love with her,” I admit softly.
“Would it have made a difference?”
“Yes!” I say. “Of course it would have.”
He squints at me warily. “Oh, I’m sure. You always have to go after what’s mine. You can’t ever let me have something for myself.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I ask, slamming the carton of juice back in the fridge. “It was a harmless pact.”
“I know you didn’t mean anything by it. But that kind of pisses me off even more.” His gives me an acidic smirk. “You know, I thanked my lucky stars that I saw her first. That I hired her. That I asked her out. I wasn’t about to let you have something else you didn’t need. You get everything Linden, just handed to you, all the fucking time. But you didn’t get her.”
I ball my hands up into fists and then release them. “Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?”
“And there you go with your devil may care attitude, like you don’t give a shit, because you don’t give a shit. Not about anyone but yourself.”
“Did you come all the way here to tell me you’re in love with Stephanie or was it just an excuse to tell me every grudge you’ve always harbored?”
He sucks on his teeth. Then his shoulders relax a bit. “No. I came here to tell you about her. Everything else…kind of slipped out.”
I fold my arms tightly over my chest, feeling an intense mix of anger and hurt rolling inside me. “Anything else then? Come on, I can take it. Obviously, I don’t care about anything except myself.”