Page 24 of Friend Zone to End Zone

It took everything in me not to jump on this opportunity to tell her just how wrong Chad was for her. But since I knew she needed to come to this conclusion on her own, I simply asked, “What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess when he does things like he did tonight, it shows me a side of him that I don’t really like. And it makes me wonder if he’s really as awesome as I’ve let myself believe he is, or if he’s just a huge jerk.”

“That is something to think about,” I said, still trying to be neutral even though I wanted to shout from the rooftops that she was finally seeing through the façade of Chad.

She sighed loudly through the phone. “And it also makes me wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t met Chad first.”

Wait… What?

My heart throbbed hard in my chest as my mind wanted to interpret her words to mean what I’d dreamed she’d say since the moment we met.

Was she saying she wondered what might have happened between her and me if she hadn’t met Chad first?

Or was she saying something else?

Before I could figure out her meaning, she sighed again and said, “Oh well. Sadly, we can’t go back in time and see how things might have turned out if we’d made a different choice.”

Wait, no.

I wanted to circle back to the part about meeting me first.

But she continued, “I guess I just have to move forward from here and decide if I need to change a few things.”

10

Cole

“So,I know we said we’d look for your next girlfriend at the club tomorrow night,” Arianna said when she climbed into my Land Rover Monday evening, wearing a shimmery teal dress that showed off just the right amount of her long, tanned legs to make me swallow hard. “But Hannah told me several of her single girlfriends will be at the viewing party tonight, so I figured it might be a good chance for you to practice your flirting.”

“Practice flirting?” I asked, a surge of anxiety filling me.

“Yeah,” she said. “Might as well get a jumpstart on this thing, right? Plus, I heard her friend, Mallory, is a model so I’m sure she’s gorgeous.”

That could be. But since Arianna was currently tempting me like nothing else in that cocktail dress, I really couldn’t care less about how attractive anyone else might be.

I mean, when you’ve found the perfect woman for you, why waste your time looking at others?

But instead of saying any of that, I said, “So will it just be me and twenty other women there tonight?” Because having Arianna watch me attempt to flirt with women I wasn’t really interested in was not my idea of a fun Monday night. I needed at least a few other guys there taking some of the heat.

“Ethan is coming with Jada,” Arianna said with a shrug.

In other words, I’d be the only single guy there with a bunch of single women who loved romance so much they threw parties for a show all about it.

“Are you telling me it’s going to be a meat market in there and I’m basically the main course?” I raised an eyebrow.

Arianna laughed. “It’s nothing you haven’t had to handle before. It will be fine.”

I gave her a skeptical look, starting to wonder if I should have actually hired Ethan to be my dating coach over Arianna since he’d successfully made it out of the friend zone already while Arianna’s tactics for finding me a girlfriend were sounding a bit iffy so far.

Maybe I should just tell her I wasn’t ready to flirt with other women tonight. She had to know me well enough to understand that I needed time to prepare for something like this.

But then I supposed that since part of my plan was to purposely suck at flirting and dating, the lack of notice would probably only help that come even more naturally.

So I said, “Hopefully, I’m still all these women’s type with my new haircut then, huh?”

“Yeah, pretty sure you being someone’s type has never been the issue.” Arianna glanced sideways at me with a smile on her glossy pink lips. “More like you just never really tried before. So as long as you are ready for love, I’m sure it will find you sooner than you think. Maybe even tonight.”

Oh, I was ready for love. Just not with any of the woman she was telling me to flirt with.

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