I strode past her, and before I was out of earshot, I heard her mutter, “Dick.”
The apprehension and nerves were long gone, but my jaw clenched at the surprising pang of irritation I felt. I’d been called worse by women. By teammates. Not by someone like Molly, though. Someone kind and friendly.
I kept walking, not a single pause in my long strides, because I was here to do a job, and Molly Ward had nothing to do with it.
MOLLY
“Conceited.”
Smack.
“Arrogant.”
Smack. Smack.
“Little.”
Smack.
“Prick.”
Isabel raised an eyebrow. “Little, huh?”
“Shut up.” I punched the bag again, grinning when it moved her backward from where she was bracing an arm against it. I pulled back one more time and hit the front of the heavy bag with a right cross, then shook my arm out and braced my gloved hands on my knees.
Isabel handed me my water bottle and dropped onto the floor, folding her legs neatly underneath her. The kickboxing gym didn’t hold any classes during the lunch hour, so it was empty. Paige used to come here when she first married Logan, and slowly, our whole family became involved in one way or another. Isabel, the showoff, had to one-up everyone by taking over as the manager a couple of years ago when the owner was ready to spend more time with her family.
Perks of being sister of the manager was a private place to work out my lunchtime frustrations when my former crush, minor though it might have been, turned out to be a major league asshole. Flopping onto the floor next to her, I stretched my legs out and hissed at the burn in my quads. “If you do more squats tonight in class, I’ll walk out.”
“No, you won’t,” she said. “That’s the reason your ass looks so phenomenal.”
I sighed. “True.”
“What happened?”
No sigh this time, but a deep, tortured, dramatic groan. “Do I have to talk about it?”
Isabel laid down next to me and folded her arms calmly over her middle. “Yes. I’m bored and have no life outside of work, and I’d like to live vicariously through your drama. Just like I always have.”
And it was true. I was older than Iz by two years, and she was two years older than our twin sisters, Lia and Claire. The small gap in ages between four girls meant that we were up in each other’s business allllll the time.
I shifted, stretching an arm over my chest. “He was so … mean. And all I did was get onto an elevator. Like I even knew he was in there!”
“And you haven’t seen him even once since, you know, the incident?” she asked delicately. Which should’ve been humorous because it was Isabel. She didn’t do anything delicately.
“Nope.” I pulled my gloves off and tossed them over by my bag. Sitting up, I wrapped my fingers around my toes to stretch the backs of my legs. Isabel sat up too, tucking her knees into her chest and wrapping her arms around them. “I mean, I knew he played for Miami because I hear his name all the time. It’s not like I was clueless about what he was doing, but”—I shrugged—“he was just the guy I used to have a crush on. I had lots of crushes in high school. He was hardly special.”
Isabel pursed her lips.
“Shut up,” I said. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“Do you, though?”
I tugged at the Velcro around my wrist and slowly unwound my sweaty wraps from my hand. “I can make an excellent guess.”
Iz set her chin on her knees and watched me. She used to do that as a kid, too. Watch everything around her. Soak it up and process what she observed. It was what made her a good listener because she saw everything.
“So he’s, what? Been pissed at you for nine years because you did something monumentally stupid as a teenager?”
“Geeez,” I muttered. “Tell me how you really feel, Iz.”
She gave me a look. “You climbed through his window, Mol. It wasn’t your brightest moment.”
Hurt and embarrassment warred for my instant reaction, but I couldn’t bring myself to deny it. At sixteen, I’d been boy-crazy, just like all my friends. And it was just my luck that as a next-door neighbor, I’d been given the ultimate gift. A hot college boy who was home a lot during the offseason.
“I was so convinced that he saw me, that he noticed me like I noticed him.” I pulled off the other wrap, dumping it into a pile with the first one, then flexed my fingers. “I used to blame Mom, you know? Like her leaving us created this insatiable desire to make sure people liked me enough to want to stick around.”
Isabel snorted. “I still blame Mom for a lot. Just ask my therapist.”
My head swiveled in her direction. “You go to a therapist? Since when?”
“Eh, I went twice before it pissed me off. She was a whack job who kept asking me stupid questions. If I knew why I was so angry with my mother, would I be paying her a hundred bucks an hour?”
Laughing under my breath, I shook my head. That sounded about right. The thought of my emotionally reserved sister spilling her guts in a comfy chair to a shrink did not compute, not in any reality I was aware of. It sounded like something I would do. Allow a perfect stranger to untangle my emotions and figure out why the woman who gave birth to us didn’t love us enough to want to stick around.
All four of us bore scars to varying degrees, and over time, they’d all healed differently. Mine was a sense of urgency if I knew someone didn’t like me, whatever the reason. A niggling discomfort under my skin to fix it, fix it, fix it.
I sighed. “I’m sure that’s part of it, but it was him, too. I’d completely convinced myself if I just … had the chance to really talk to him, he’d fall head over heels in love with me, and I’d have the hottest boyfriend out of all my friends, who played college football.”
“Not surprising for a sixteen-year-old.”
“No, but it was crazy. To do what I did.” My face flushed hot when I thought about it. Something I hadn’t really done in years. The moments before his dad walked through the door, I’d never felt more alive. More womanly.
It should have been a blazing red warning light that Noah had no qualms about kissing me like he did or touching me like he had after I climbed through his effing window without so much as a single meaningful conversation between the two of us.
That five minutes after my legs cleared the windowsill, I was straddling his lap. I should’ve worried that his big, hot hands were underneath my shirt, sliding up my back and tugging it up over my head, when we’d barely kissed. That my hands shook where I’d laid them on his muscular shoulders because when he did kiss me, it felt like I was drowning in something so much bigger than I’d been prepared for.
If his dad hadn’t walked in, I would’ve slept with Noah Griffin that day. And he probably would’ve never spoken to me again afterward.
It was something I had to come to grips with after it all went down.
After Mr. Griffin marched me back home to face my furious brother and my disappointed sister-in-law, I curled up in my bed and sobbed my sixteen-year-old heart out. The look on Noah’s face when he realized how old I was cemented the fact that any happily ever after I’d imagined with him would stay firmly planted in my teenage brain.
“You know how every age you’re at,” I said, “you feel like, this is the most mature I’ll ever be. Right now, I have it all figured out.”
Isabel smiled.
“And then a few years pass, and you want to slap your past self for ever thinking something that stupid.”
She laughed under her breath. “Yeah. I know exactly what you mean.”
“I wish I could go back and handcuff myself to my bed, so I never climbed through that damn window. I wish I could go back and get on the elevator two minutes later so that I never realized what a big, dumb asshole he is now.” I shook my head. “I really, really wish I could take back the moment I said I wanted to be friends with him.”
Her face was sad as she listened. “That doesn’t sound like you. You’re friends with everyone.”
“Not Noah Griffin.”
Inexplicably, that made Isabel grin.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.