Wasted Time (The Steel City #1)

18. Penny

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

penny

I wake up with a piercing headache.

Avery’s house is quiet. It’s a strange feeling, sitting here in silence. There’s a peace to it, something that I haven’t felt in a long time, but it’s lonely. The sun is only just starting to rise, signaling that I should probably still be asleep, but sleep seems to be running from me.

Soft pink and orange strands of light slip through the gaps in the blinds, dancing along the duvet that’s wrapped around me like a shield. My body wants rest, but it’s searching for the weight of another body on the mattress. My mind wants solitude, but it’s reaching out for a hand that’s no longer there.

I’m exhausted.

Seth is a morning person. Biggest one I know, probably. My best friend is the opposite. When I finally hear their bedroom door open and the pitter patter of footsteps sliding past my room, I know it isn’t Avery who has started her day. I debate joining him downstairs in an effort to avoid my thoughts, but I can’t bring myself to do that either.

So, I lay in bed and stare at the ceiling instead.

I have to tell her today.

Gavin still hasn’t called or texted. Not once. He wouldn’t have seen me in any of the social media posts because I wasn’t at the party, but he has to be well aware that Avery is engaged by now. He broke my heart and my best friend got engaged the same night. Even that wasn’t enough to prompt him to check in and see if I am alright. He has no clue if I crashed my car into a ditch or arrived alive.

He doesn’t know and he doesn’t care.

I shut my eyes, burying my face in my pillows. I breathe in deeply to try and force the emotion away before it overwhelms me. I don’t want to drown in this, I want to swim. I want to make it to shore and carry on with my life, the battle against the tide long since over.

I’m sad and I’m angry. Those emotions are there, clear as day, weighing on my heart. But one emotion seemed to vanish almost as quickly as it came, making me breathe a tiny bit easier today.

Guilt.

Even though I felt guilty the moment that I opened my eyes in the hotel room, that feeling has passed. I just feel scared. Scared of the repercussions, scared of what I’ll lose, scared that it makes me a bad person—but not guilty.

That has to mean something, right?

Besides the fact that the sex was indescribable, I felt something I haven’t felt in my entire life in that suite. I can’t dream of wanting to take it back, even if I shouldn’t have let it happen in the first place. It’s no wonder women throw themselves at Declan. He is so good looking that it is borderline rude, but he also knows how to please a woman.

And he has a big heart. That’s important, too.

I groan, smothering my face in the pillow—trying to stop the flashbacks. They will not do me any favours. Not when I would do it over and over again if that body, that face, and that heart were attached to a different human. Declan had been entirely focused on me, and that was such a happy surprise that I am greedy for it again.

I came three times in one night. Three!

But it shouldn’t have happened.

If we fight the way we do as friends, crossing that line has the power to create a nuclear war between us. Venturing down that road is dangerous, especially with the current state of my head and heart. It can’t happen again. I have to focus on myself right now, not on destroying one of the other most important relationships in my life while I’m still lying in the ashes of another.

Hours have gone by, and I still haven’t moved a muscle.

Avery saunters in, dressed in a matching PJ set that looks like a puffy, white cloud. Her quarter zip sweater is pulled all the way up to her chin, giving the illusion that her head is floating in the middle of the summer sky.

She looks like a damn Samoyed dog. I want to pet her.

She carries two mugs of delicious smelling coffee in her hands, a sleepy smile on her face.

“I come with gifts.”

“ You are a gift,” I murmur, peeling my face from the pillow.

I sit up, sliding over to make room for her on the bed. She crawls under the covers with me and props herself up against the headboard, handing me my blue mug. One look and my mouth waters. It’s topped with whipped cream and chocolate shavings.

Always the hostess with the mostest, even though I’d wager that last part was Seth.

“What creamer?” I ask, licking some of the whipped cream.

She shoots me a look.

“Irish cream,” she says, sarcastically .

I smirk and take a greedy sip. It’s still a bit too hot, but it feels so good going into my bloodstream that I’ll risk the burnt tongue.

Avery rests her head against my shoulder, letting out a dreamy breath. We watch the sky slowly change colours outside of the window. It’s getting light out now, but it’s such a pale blue that the world looks almost lilac.

It’s pretty and it’s peaceful and I’m home.

“I have to tell you something,” I say quietly.

Avery stills. She slowly peels her face from my shoulder and meets my eyes. Her expression is one of sheer fear.

“You have to be in the wedding party.”

I open my mouth, but snap it shut just as quickly.

“What?”

“Oh, thank god,” she breathes out, placing a hand over her heart. “I had this weird dream where you said you were moving to another country and couldn’t be in the wedding. I thought I manifested it into reality.”

I stare at her, blinking slowly. “I worry about you sometimes.”

“I’m just saying. I know I haven’t officially asked you yet, but you know you’re the maid of honour, right? The maid of honour can’t back out. That’s not very honourly.”

“I’m not backing out,” I remind her carefully.

“Not unless you move to another country,” she grumbles, taking a sip of her coffee.

“Even then,” I say, looking at her like she has three heads. How did we get here? I just found the courage to fess up to her and now we’re talking about moving to another country and ditching her wedding, which is something I would absolutely never do, by the way.

The first part does sound tempting, though.

“It’s not about the wedding.”

“Oh?” she asks, finally looking at me like she’s ready to listen.

“I’m not here because you got engaged.”

Her brow furrows. She scans my face carefully but says nothing.

“I didn’t know. Seth never told me.”

Her frown deepens, and the immediate splotch of redness on her neck tells me that angers her. I don’t think she absorbed much of our first conversation in the kitchen yesterday. But still, she says nothing, she just sits in the silence and lets me continue.

“I got in that night.” With this admission, her face falls and I can practically see her heart breaking in her chest. I was here that night, but I wasn’t here. “I came here to see you, completely forgetting about Friendsgiving, not knowing that you got engaged.”

“Why didn’t you come in?” she whispers.

“Because Declan answered the door,” I explain carefully. She knows about the fight, so I continue quickly before she thinks I left because of him. “I don’t think he wanted me to ruin your night, or to ruin my own even worse than it had been.”

“What are you talking about?” Avery asks quietly.

“Gavin broke up with me.”

Avery’s face falls slack. She stares at me, almost like she’s waiting for a punchline, and it hurts to see the pain that explodes over her face because it’s for me. I am causing her pain because she knows that I’m hurting.

Her hand touches my leg over the blankets. “ What?”

I swallow, averting my eyes from hers. “I didn’t think. I just came straight here. Straight to you.”

“And I was getting engaged,” she murmurs. There’s a beat of silence, and then she’s taking the blue mug from me and she’s placing them both on the nightstand.

Within a second, I’m pulled into her arms, being smothered in warm vanilla. “I’m so sorry, Pen. You should have come in. Seth should have invited you. I’m going to kill him.”

“It’s okay,” I whisper, but something in me feels better knowing she’s just as upset that I wasn’t here.

“What the hell happened?” She runs her hand down my arm.

I relay the story. I relay the things he said. I keep those private things I told Declan between him and I, because I can’t find it in me to admit them out loud again.

Avery’s grip on me turns lethal the more I tell her, and when she drops into an eerie silence, I know she’s planning every way she could kill him and get away with it.

“That scumbag,” she seethes when I finish.

Her nails are digging into my skin to the point where she could draw blood. I wince, trying to slide out of her grasp, but she hangs on tighter.

“You were too good for him, you know that right?” she yells at me, though I think she means for that tone to be comforting. Her brown eyes are blazing. “He had no fucking clue what he had in his hands. He’s so self-absorbed. Big shot finance man can’t handle his emotions.”

Aaaaand, queue the best friend shit talk.

“To drop it out of nowhere too, after you just moved cities for him? After you quit your job? Oh, I’ll skin him alive, Pen. I’ll cut his nuts off and hang them from my rearview mirror.”

I bark out a laugh, happy that she chose rage instead of tears. I always find it kind of funny when she’s angry, being such a tiny human, so it makes it easier to keep my own emotions at bay.

“So, are you moving home? Is that why you’re here? ”

“I don’t know,” I admit, holding onto her forearm gently. “I just panicked and left. I couldn’t look at him anymore. I couldn’t sit in the same room as him.”

She snorts, muttering a new, imaginative name for him under her breath.

“I actually think I’ll swing if I see him again. That or run him over with my car.” She’s shaking her head, over and over. “Not proud? Please. You’re beautiful, and you work hard. He couldn’t have built that life without you.”

Ouch. There it is. She hit the sweet spot, right where I’m the most vulnerable. Those are the words I replay in my head over and over. They make me sick.

The fact that he practically said he was embarrassed about who I am really broke my heart. Who was this man? Why had I stayed for so long? Who says something like that to a person you’re supposed to care about? How does someone bottle up feelings like that for years and then release them like it’s nothing?

A tear slips through. I hurriedly wipe it away with my sleeve.

Avery stares at me. For a moment, she doesn’t move, but then she pulls me back into the comfort of her arms. She flattens out my hair with her hand, forcing my face to her chest.

“I’m so sorry, P.”

“I know,” I murmur, sucking in a shaky breath. “Me too.”

More tears fall, but Avery stays wrapped around me. She doesn’t apologize for talking about her engagement when I arrived because she knows I’ll scold her for even thinking that she couldn’t have. We can have separate lives and go through separate things and still be happy for one another, even if it hurts sometimes.

I’d smack her if she apologized for being happy.

“Do you have a plan?” she whispers, her cheek moving against my head.

“No.”

“Do you want to stay in London?”

“I hate that city and that house,” I grumble, and she barks out a laugh.

It’s true. I despise it. But, like usual, Gavin had convinced me that it was for the best.

It’s on a corner lot. I hate corner lots. It has a lot of land, but I have always dreamed of a balcony with a view. We had that in our last home. We finally had that. It killed me to sell that house. I nearly threw up when we signed the papers, knowing that I was handing over my dream home, something we had worked so hard on, to another family.

And we moved to the corner lot. The house that was modernized and pristine. The house that felt like it was built for magazines, not for living in.

“Have you talked to your boss?”

“I took a week off,” I admit, recalling how understanding she was. “Then, I’ll work remotely. They don’t mind. I think I could move home with no issues.”

“Do you want to move home?” Avery reaches for the mugs she’d taken from us both. She hands me back my hazelnut latte.

I take a sip and sigh with relief.

“I miss home. I miss you. I miss feeling like I belong somewhere.”

“You’ve always belonged here,” Avery whispers. “We’ll always be ready for you to come home, Pen. You know that. Home is always home.”

“I just… I wish I stayed to begin with.”

Avery stares down at her creamy drink as she ponders what I’ve just said. I see the restraint in her face, how she’s holding back from saying what she truly wants to say. She doesn’t want to go too far, especially when it’s so fresh.

There’s a funny thing about loving someone. Even when they hurt you, you still find the need to defend them to the world. There’s an instinct to protect them, even when they are ripping you to shreds from the inside out. There’s a fine line between when you’re heartbroken, but still hanging on, and when you finally step over that line and are ready to hear the truth.

I know Avery. She’s careful. She doesn’t want to step over the lines that are still there, even if I don’t want to admit that they exist.

When people used to talk poorly about Gavin, Avery would defend him before I had to. She is my best friend. That’s what best friends do, even when she wants to smack him upside the head. She’ll tell me how she really feels, but to everyone else, she’s supportive and unwavering.

“You followed your heart,” she says after a long moment. “You loved him. You followed him because it was what was best for you at the time, and it is what you wanted. If you stayed, you would have regretted it.”

She’s right. I would have sat in this city, dwelled on the past, and wondered what would have happened if I had followed Gavin down south. I would have wondered if he was the one who got away.

The beginning with Gavin was a whirlwind. My whole world changed. Colours were brighter, smells were more decadent, and life seemed to make sense. When he kissed me, it felt like nothing else mattered. I’d spend all night awake, texting him from my apartment, smiling like a giddy little kid at my phone.

I loved him.

I think he might have used to love me, too .

Now, I wonder if that man I knew had ever truly existed. We all grow, we all get older, and priorities and behaviours change, but this is different. It’s like somewhere along the line, his mask slipped off and he stopped bothering to try and put it back on.

I have been desperate for that man back. It’s almost pathetic how much effort I put in to see a glimpse of him. Making his favourite food, only for him to say a simple thank you and eat it while he sat on his phone. Dressing up for his eyes to skim past me like I was a piece of the furniture.

It’s lonely loving someone that you used to know. You hang on to memories rather than reality, manipulating and construing who they have clearly become in hopes that who they were will make a reappearance.

“You can come home and live in this spare room until you figure it out.”

“I know,” I smile, bringing my mug to my lips.

“Or you can stay in London, and I’ll come visit. You can move to Nunavut. We’ll Facetime every single day until we can see each other. As long as?—”

“—I stay in the wedding?” I cut her off, angling my head to look at her.

A grin pulls at the edges of her lips. “Exactly. The point is, whatever makes you happy is what is most important. Whenever you need help, just ask me. Ask any of us. We’ll help you.”

“What if I just want to go get ice cream twice a day for a year?”

Avery shrugs a shoulder, making my head bounce against it.

“Then I size-up my wedding dress in preparation.”