“Nice try, but no,” she grunts. “Rivers is the most calculated person you’ll ever meet. He doesn’t take a shit without thinking about it first. There’s no way he just got excited and drove straight here with her.”

Damn, if she knew about the shit he took on the side of the road a few weeks ago, she’d have no choice but to change her argument on the whole ‘calculated’ thing, but then, he is the guy who convinced me to make a game plan when taking down Monica rather than bursting in with my claws ready. I let out a sigh. “I don’t know, Tully,” I say, terrified of saying the wrong thing and making it worse. “I can’t tell you what was going through his head.”

“I fucking can,” she all but yells across the room before storming off to her room with me following behind. “He’s purposefully trying to hurt me,” she insists, throwing herself in front of her mirror to put her earrings in. “I’ve been talking about Rocko and whoring around, and now he’s going to do the same just to give me the middle finger.”

“Maybe he actually likes her,” I suggest.

Cringe.

“Likes her or likes the fact that she has a little, willing, pink pussy to sink into each night?” she scoffs with an attitude I’ve never quite seen from her before, telling me just how much this is bothering her.

This isn’t going anywhere good.

She perks up a little and looks at me through the mirror. “Get out there and scare her off,” she tells me. “I don’t want her barging her way into our lives.”

I shake my head. “I don’t either, but I can’t do it. Rivers is my friend too and if he actually likes her, then he deserves a chance to be happy too.”

“You’re such a fucking pushover now that you’re in love,” she mumbles. “I liked you better when you had that big fucking wall up. Nobody could even get near you then. Especially chicks like that.”

I shrug my shoulders. “Sorry for giving a shit,” I laugh. “And for the record, you guys got close and I still haven’t worked out how to get rid of you.”

“Keep letting Alyssa hang out and you won’t have an issue getting rid of me.”

“You know, Rivers will come around one day,” I tell her. “He just needs to fuck everything up first.”

She lets out a frustrated groan before walking over to her makeup box and finding a lip gloss. “He already did fuck everything up and then I fucked it all up some more by sleeping with Spencer again. There’s no going back for us. We’re too far gone which is why I’m trying so hard to move on. I can’t keep thinking about him like this all the time. It’s going to kill me. I have to move on.”

I move across her room and drop down onto her bed. “Are you sure, though?” I question, giving her a tight smile. “Are you sure you don’t want to give it one last shot with him? Maybe wait a few months. He might just need a little time to cool down. You never know.”

“But I do know,” she says with a heartbreaking sigh. “I’ve known him since we were eleven. It’s not something he’s about to budge on. I’ll be waiting years for him to come around and by then, he might be a different guy. A couple of years can change someone.”

“But would that change really matter if you’re in love with him? He’ll still be the same person you’ve always known.”

“I don’t know,” she says, shrugging her shoulders. “I just want to move on and forget about him.”

Tully drops down on her bed beside me and I instantly wrap my arms around her. “It’ll be ok,” I tell her. “If forgetting about him is what you really want, then that’s what we’ll do. You can have your date with Rocko tonight and hopefully, he’ll rock your world and you’ll fall madly in love with the guy, despite everyone else’s opinion of him. Then tomorrow night, we can find a party and drink way too much.”

She pouts out her bottom lip. “That sounds really, really good.”

Tully’s phone goes off on her bedside table and I dive for it as she tries to grab it. “Is that him?” I demand, pulling the phone out of her reach.

“Give it back,” she yells as I swipe to unlock the screen, but she doesn’t put up enough of a fight, telling me she actually doesn’t give a shit if I read her text. I look down at the screen before waggling my eyebrows at her with a shit eating grin. “It’s from Rocko,” I tease.

“Duh,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Who else would be texting?”

“Oh, considering the number of guys you’ve been leading on these past few weeks, I could think of a whole list of people who’d be looking for you on a Friday night.”


Tags: Sheridan Anne Haven Falls Romance