Page 180 of The Bet
“What happened?” Cara insisted, moving closer. “What did you guys talk about?”
Izzy hugged the cushion closer to her, and shrugged.
Cara was relentless. “Great. So you’re not going to tell me. What about Shoemoney? Why did he throw the wine at him?”
She looked up. “He said it made him mad when he saw him, and he couldn’t help himself.”
Cara sat down beside her. “It made him mad?”
She recounted the conversation, having already gone over it in her head for what must have been the twentieth time in the past hour. Over the past few weeks, as her anger had started to die down, and was replaced by a sense of sadness, she had been left with memories pushed so far away, she had to make an effort to recall them.
“He said he wanted to kill him, and he would have punched him, but he didn’t want a scene.”
“Fan me down with a million feathers,” said Cara, flapping the hairbrush in front of her. “I wish I had a guy who was that crazy about me.”
She lifted her head. “He’s not crazy about me. It’s guilt that he’s feeling.”
“Or, you could becompletelywrong,” said Cara, exaggerating her words, “and he could be crazy about you.”
Cara was a fool who romanticized everything. “I can’t forget what he did. That would be stupid. That would be me thinking with my heart instead of my head.”
“You need to do more feeling, and less thinking, Iz, because logic doesn’t have thefeels. Logic is cold, hard facts, and it misses what the heart instinctivelyknows.”
“You hopeless romantic.”
“You sad, miserable pragmatist.”
But she had been thinking, and she’d remembered those days, those moments, those slices of time they had spent together. The times they had kissed, and he’d held her in is arms, his body hard, his face a picture of torture, as she’d run her hands over him, and he would stop her from getting carried away.
There’s no rush, is there?He’d say.
She’d thought that he was quite the romantic, and so different from the womanizing asshole.
“How many times does that man have to tell you he’s sorry? Sounds to me as if he knows that what he did was stupid and he’s trying to get that through to you. We all make mistakes, Izzy. Why can’t you get over your high morals and forgive him?”
“Once a jerk, always a jerk.”
She was surrounded by jerks, it seemed. Even the guy on the last double date had tried to cop a feel at the cinema until she had ‘accidentally’ poured her popcorn all over him.
Xavier had never tried to cop a feel accidentally, and he’d gotten his own form of revenge back on Shoemoney, no matter how small, he had stood up for her. She tried to imagine being at the restaurant surrounded by his family, by that formidable mother of his, and Tobias, and to have had the guts to get up and do what he did.
Tobias must have hit the roof.
“I’d really like to be alone, Cara. Please. Can’t you go out and leave me?”
The muscles around Cara’s face tightened. “I’m not convinced you’re over him.”
“I am.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to. We weren’t together for that long.”
“You spent a long time in the friend zone,” countered Cara.
“We spent more time in the war zone,” she replied, remembering how things had been early on.
“I’m not leaving until you make a choice.”
