Page 85 of Wild Ever After
My heart rate speeds up and I quicken my steps to get inside. I come up short when I spot her bag inside the front door.
“Jade?” I call, moving toward the kitchen, where the light is on. Her back is to me, and her red hair is pulled up in a ponytail. My heart fucking leaps at the sight of her.
“Hey. When’d you get back?”
She glances over her shoulder at me, then grabs a coffee mug from the cabinet. “A couple of hours ago.”
“Oh, shit, sorry. I was just at Ash’s, getting in a workout. You should have texted.”
“No, it’s fine. I know you’re busy and I am behind on my article.”
“Did you have a good weekend?” I ask, cautiously. She wasn’t supposed to be back until tomorrow.
“Yeah. We finished painting and I didn’t want to sleep on the sofa another night.”
It isn’t the enthusiastic, I missed you and couldn’t wait another night to see you, that I was hoping for, but I’m still glad she’s here.
“Where are the other mugs?” she asks.
“Oh, I got new ones while you were gone. Plates, too. Eight new place settings. I had no idea all that shit was supposed to match.”
Jade turns and stares at me. Fuck, she’s gorgeous. She makes my kitchen gorgeous. I take a step toward her, but she crosses her arms over her chest. “You bought new mugs?”
“Yeah. Those others were so old, I can’t even remember where I got them. I think they might have been something my grandma sent me when I got my first apartment.”
“And you just threw them out?”
“Y-yeah,” I answer slowly. “I thought you’d like the new ones. They’re red.”
I feel like an idiot pointing that out when she can clearly see the color.
“Why haven’t you told me about Crissy?”
My mind spins, trying to figure out how we went from mugs to this. “Crissy?”
“Yeah. Your ex-girlfriend. You’ve never once mentioned her.”
“She was never my girlfriend. We hooked up occasionally over the years, but it’s been over for a while now. How did you hear about her?”
“Dakota mentioned her. She thought I knew.”
Jade’s eyes blaze with hurt or maybe anger, but I’m struggling to understand why. I haven’t given Crissy a second thought since the wedding. Then it hits me, and I feel all the mistakes of my past hit me full force. If she knows about Crissy, she knows about the post that got her fired from her internship with the Wildcats.
“I didn’t cheat on her. She posted that picture because she was pissed at me for going out with someone else, but we didn’t have that kind of relationship. We went weeks or months without talking.” I’d never cheat on Jade, or anyone for that matter.
“I still don’t understand why you wouldn’t tell me about her. When is the last time you were together?”
I’m starting to feel like whatever is bothering her isn’t really about the damn mugs or Crissy, but I’ll tell her whatever she wants to know. Maybe then she’ll really understand that what we have is different than anything else I’ve had before.
“March.”
“And you haven’t talked to her at all since?”
“She texted a couple of times. I told her it was over. She was struggling to accept it.”
“When?”
“The last time I talked to her was the night of your bachelorette party. She was calling and texting. I finally blocked her.”
