She winced. Her “ooh” just barely audible.
“Yeah,” I mumbled as her boob passed about an inch from my face. “His old coach was coming into town or something, and he was busy watching game film or something with the team when he called, but it doesn’t matter. It was a stupid idea to invite him anyway.”
“I’m sure he had a good reason to cancel,” Di tried to assure me.
There was only one reason, and it was the most important one to him. I didn’t need the details to know what the exact wording would be. “Yeah. I’m sure he did.” I let out a shaky breath. “I’m just in a shitty mood. Sorry.”
“No, I can’t believe it,” the smart-ass gasped.
I reached forward and tried to pinch her through the apron she’d put on, but she danced out of the way with a big grin on her face. “Leave me alone.”
She stuck her tongue out. “Put your potato head down for a second, would you?”
I mocked her as I did what she asked. Diana took a step toward me, her belly inches away. She must have reached forward because her shirt went up an inch, exposing a sliver of skin.
I frowned.
Reaching from under the hem of the cape she’d put on me, I pulled her shirt up even higher, exposing a row of small bruises shaped like a smaller version of the ones on my forearm.
“What are you doing?” She took a step away.
I looked up at her, at her face, her neck, her arms, and saw nothing that shouldn’t have been there.
“What?” Her tone was a lot less harsh the second time, but I knew, I knew from the way she rubbed her pant leg that something was going on. That was her nervous tic.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
I had to count to ten again before I could manage to not lose it. “What happened?” I asked her as coolly and calmly as possible even though I was already on my way to becoming even angrier than I’d been when I first showed up.
Diana tried to brush it off a little too quickly. “Nothing. Why?” She had the nerve to look down and pull up her shirt in the same way I had. She even frowned as she touched the bruises I’d bet my first born she knew damn well about.
“Where did those come from?”
She didn’t look up as she answered. “I remember hitting my hip.”
“You hit your hip?” She was lying. She was damn well lying out of her ass.
“On the counter.”
“On the counter?” I asked slowly. This felt like a terrible dream.
My best friend—my best friend of my entire life—lied again. “Yeah,” she insisted.
“Di—” I wasn’t going to lose it. I wasn’t going to lose it front of her.
“Let me finish putting this on your hair,” she cut me off.
“Diana—”
“Tip your head down one more time, Vanny.”
“Di.” I grabbed the hand she had extended toward me. Her brown eyes shot to mine, her expression startled. “Did Jeremy do that?”
“No!”
A knot formed in my throat, growing bigger and bigger by the second. “Diana Fernanda Casillas.” Yeah, I went with her whole name. My hand shook. “Did Jeremy do that?”
This fucking liar supreme met my gaze evenly, and if it weren’t for her palm hitting her pant leg again, I would have believed she was telling me the truth, that this person I loved, who I would do anything for, and who I felt would do anything for me, wouldn’t lie to me.
I wasn’t even about to focus on the fact that I’d kept things to myself in the past. That I hadn’t told her I’d married Aiden. That she didn’t know about my student debts. None of that configured into my thoughts in that instant.
“No, Van. He loves me. I hit my hip.”
That knot in my throat swelled and I could feel my eyes well up as her gaze met mine unflinchingly. That was the problem. Diana was just like me. Once she was in too deep, she wasn’t about to dig herself out of the hole she was in. She wasn’t about to back down and tell me the truth.
“I’m fine, Van. I swear.”
She swore. The tingling in my nose got worse. “Di,” I kind of croaked out.
The smile that took over her mouth hurt me. “I hit my hip, stupid. I promise.”
I didn’t think Diana would ever know how bad she was hurting me. I’d like to think the lies I’d told her had been to protect her, so she wouldn’t worry about me being in disastrous debt, and I hadn’t told her Aiden and I eloped because she had a big mouth and she’d tell everyone. I knew she’d grudgingly understand that after she was done being mad for not being the first person I told. She didn’t know how to keep a secret; we all knew it.
But this…
I didn’t have it in me to keep my mouth shut even though I knew there was no way in hell she was going to backtrack and admit the truth. Tightening my hold on her, I tried to ignore the severe beating of my heart and made sure her eyes met mine. “Di—”
She was lying. She was being a massive liar as she said, “It’s just a bruise, Van.”
But it wasn’t.
It wasn’t.
It was the conservative sedan parked in the driveway when I got home that told me we had a visitor. Leslie.
Oh Leslie.
The one person in the world who I actually liked, but every once in a while, specifically this weekend and every June 15th, made me just a teensy bit jealous. Leslie was the only person in the world who I could honestly say Aiden cared about, and I guess I was just a greedy, selfish asshole. I couldn’t even get a ‘happy birthday’ on my special day, while Aiden didn’t just remember Leslie’s birthday, but he cared enough to get me to send him a present.
Was I seriously complaining about Aiden caring about someone who wasn’t me?
I was in a bad mood—a worse mood than I’d been in when I’d first gotten back to Dallas five hours ago. Hell, I’d been in a bad mood since I left for El Paso. All I wanted to do was get home, stew in my anger, and maybe watch a movie to get my mind off all the things that were bothering me. My mom, Susie, her husband Ricky, Diana, her boyfriend, and Aiden. I wanted to be alone.
Parking on the street, I grabbed my suitcase from the backseat, ignoring the pain radiating from my wrist, and trudged up the driveway, then the path.
I counted to ten over and over again as I unlocked the door and slipped inside as quietly as possible.
“Vanessa?”
I was halfway up the stairs with my suitcase gripped in hand when Aiden’s voice reached me from the foot of them. Slowly lowering my bag to the step I was on, I ground down on my molars and glanced over my shoulder at the man who had stood me up, standing there in between the living room and the foyer in his sweat pants and a tank so loose I could see the ripped sides of some of the sexiest muscles in the universe.
Did I love sexy lateral muscles? Of course. I had ovaries.
But I also had a brain, a heart, and some pride, and huge, brawny arms on someone who left me hanging weren’t going to make me forget a single thing.
Things might have gone worse if he’d been there, I tried to remind myself as I tugged at the sleeve of the hoodie I’d put on before leaving Diana’s, drawing it further down my arm. But the other half of my brain wanted to believe that maybe the weekend would have gone differently if Aiden had been there.
Then again, maybe I just wanted to blame someone other than myself for not listening to my instincts when they told me to do something, and then I did otherwise.
“Yes?” I asked, sensing my cheeks go tight.
The big guy was examining me, something about the way he was pursing his lips said he was hesitating. “Leslie’s here.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when a white head of hair peeked out from the living room. Nearly as tall as Aiden and way more fit than any man who should have been considered elderly could be, Leslie Prescott flashed those perfect white veneers at me. “Hello, Vanessa.”
A sharp pain thudded right between my eyebrows unexpectedly. I set my suitcase down in place and smiled at the man I’d met in the past. We’d spent months together in Colorado on two separate occasions, and he’d visited Aiden the rest of the times. I liked him; I really did like him, but I was in a shitty mood, and it wasn’t fair to take it out on him.