Page 11 of My Ex's Best Friend

“No.”

“What? It’s not my fault he always checks in electronically, so I waited until the site marked them as checked in and called to say there had been some last-minute problem and asked them to cancel the tickets and I’d wait on the line for the confirmation they had been cancelled. I mean, it wasn’t that hard since I had all the details about the reservation.”

“But won’t they get the cancellation email?”

I shake my head as we walk to the living room. “Since I was on the phone and they had checked in already, the tickets became non-refundable, and I told her to send the confirmation to my email address. And I know, it wasn’t exactly the most mature thing to do, but I still feel good about it. If Derek is going to make my life at work hell, this is the least he deserves.”

As I walk past my couch, my toe stubs the edge and I limp a few times. “Ouch, ouch, ouch.” And that’s karma for me.

I sit down on the couch, wincing slightly.

“Oh, you poor thing.” She walks back to the kitchen and pulls out a bag of frozen peas for me.

I put it over my toe while she sits beside me. “I’m scared of you but also proud.”

“Thank you for coming to stay with me. Your flight ticket must have been super expensive.”

“Kind of,” she admits. “But this is a national-level emergency.”

I roll my eyes. “Hardly.”

“It is. No guy gets to hurt my best friend like that. Especially not a pretentious douchebag like Derek.”

She takes a sip from her wine.

“I’ll drink to that.” I hold up my glass in salute and take a long drink of the red I poured myself. The sour-sweet taste leaves a tingle at the back of my throat.

“So, why aren’t you at the museum today?”

I grimace. “I love it there, but I can’t bear to be there anymore. It doesn’t help that the woman he’s been cheating on me with is the one he hired a few months ago as the assistant art director.”

“What’s that?” She frowns.

“It’s something he came up with this year.” I shrug. “That should have been my giant, waving red flag. I mean, I should have seen this coming. So, the whole thing is really on me.”

“That’s so not true.”

“Did you know he saved her on his phone as Pookie Bear.”

“Barf,” she says, making a face. “The guy sucks. Even his nicknames are gross.”

“I get it, you hate him. But the truth is, I didn’t see it coming. He was sweet to me. We spent all the time together, and yet he still found the time to fuck someone else? How does that work?”

“Some men are just assholes.”

Ellie is lucky in many ways. She's been laser-focused on her career in sports media and met her long-distance boyfriend on the job.

I shake my head.

“My asshole-meter went off when I met him the first time. The guy couldn’t stop talking about his acquisitions for the museum for two minutes. I don’t think he even stopped to breathe when he was bragging about his turnovers from the museum visits ever since he became the curator or whatever. The guy was a walking inflated Excel sheet. All he could do was toot his horn.”

I had noticed that, too. But I saw it differently.

Derek was passionate about his work and had a real eye for spotting genius.

That’s why I didn’t suspect anything when he spent long hours at the museum, even after everybody else had left. It was normal for him.

The irony was when I confronted him about the cheating, he said that he felt like I was not giving him enough time, that I was ignoring him and focusing on my work—work that he had assigned me in the first place.

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