This is a joke.
This has to be a joke.
Or a hallucination, maybe. A dream—a waking fucking nightmare. This can’t be happening. There’s no way that’s who I think it is,it can’t be.
When I clumsily shoot to my feet, rattling the table, the group around me abruptly falls silent. I step away from the booth and someone catches my hand. “You okay?”
No. I’m not okay. I am so far from okay.
But I don’t know how to explain that to Finn, not without explaining everything, and I can’t do that right now.
I shake him off, stumble a step forward, and it’s as ifhesenses me coming.
Heturns around.
And a pair of lips I know well, lips I’ve felt against my own, lips that make me feel sick now lift at the corners. Triumphant and slick.
“Hey, babe,” Ricky says, and I sway on my feet. “Miss me?”
33
With a single sentence, his Lottie becomes someone else’s.
I blink.
I rub my eyes until I see stars.
I shake my head until my vision blurs, but still, Ricky remains.
He grins, he rolls his eyes at what I’m sure he’s silently deemingmy dramatics, he blows me a goddamn kiss, and I want to be sick. He steps forward and I abruptly back up, wincing as the sharp corner of the table jabs my thigh—wincing again when a hand wraps around it.
My gaze drops to Finn. Frowning, confused Finn, who’s already looking at me. My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. I have no words. No explanation for this fuckery. Nothing.
The next thing I know, I’m outside.
Without a word, without a goodbye, without really a conscious thought, but with phantom fingertips still burning the skin of my inner thigh, I drag Ricky out of Bishop’s. I shove him out the the double doors. He doesn’t stumble enough for me so Iplant my palms on his chest and shove him again, hard enough to send him reeling across the sidewalk. So hard that he almost falls on his ass, but he recovers quickly, too quickly, so I shove him once more. “What thefuckare you doing here?”
“Came to see you, baby,” he croons and I don’t find the nickname cute. I’m not endeared. It doesn’t make me weak-kneed and gooey; it makes me want to separate his head from his body and roll it down the street until it hits the wheels of the car I assume belongs to him.
Because two more woefully familiar people climb out of it.
Resisting the urge to scream at the sky, I scream at Ricky instead. “How did you find me?”
“It’s a funny story actually.”
My head swings to Ethan, where he leans against the shitty, dusty car. “I highly fucking doubt it.”
And I’m right. I don’t laugh like they do when I learn that they found Serenity through a fucking suggested ad on social media and thought there was something awfully familiar about the owner. I don’t think there’s anything funny about the universe deciding to exact some karma in such a bullshit, dumbass way.
“Charlotte Jackson.” Ricky punches me on the shoulder. “You’ve been holding out on us. You’rerich.”
And that’s why they’re here. Of course.Of fucking course. “You need to go.”
“What?” Victoria calls out from where she’s tucked beneath her smarmy boyfriend’s arm. “You embarrassed of us?”
“Oh,deeply.” And I am. Not of them, exactly, but of me. Of my past with them. Of who I was with them, the things I did with them. I’mmortifiedand I’m fucking panicking and I’m seized with the overwhelming urge to get them out of Serenity, to get themaway. “So you can fuck right off, all of you.”
Vic sneers. “You can’t seriously still be mad at us.”