Page 77 of Tattoo My Heart
“Babe.” James jumps out of his chair and rushes out in the hallway. “I didn’t know you’d be coming here today. We could’ve driven here together.”
“We could’ve,” Carrie agrees. “Too bad you just took off running and didn’t say where you were going.”
They continue bickering like this until I see the stroller coming into view. When it doesn’t look like it would fit through the door, Carrie huffs in annoyance.
“Could you move out of the way?” she addresses Micki. “Please and thank you,” she adds, but she sounds like she would run her over if she didn’t move, so no other choice but to go.
“Are you okay?” Micki asks before taking off.
“All good,” I wink at her and smile. She blushes again.
As soon as she is out of sight, Carrie pushes the stroller inside my office, bringing it almost all the way to where I’m sitting. The sleeping baby inside of it doesn’t seem to be having a care in the world.
“What the hell was that?”
I bring my eyes to Carrie when she whisper-yells at me. She has both hands on her hips and looks as if she is about to attack.
“What was what?” I shake my head at her.
“You flirting with this girl here,” she throws her thumb over her shoulder. “I thought you were in love with my best friend.”
I push myself more into my chair. “I wasn’t flirting.”
“Oh, no?” Her eyes look like they’re about to fall out of her head. She gives me an exaggerated wink. “All good.”Her voice sounds deeper when she tries to imitate me.
“He didn’t mean anything by it, babe.”
James tries to come to my defense, but it only serves for her to bring furious eyes his way now.
“You be quiet,” she points at him. “You’ve done enough.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you,” she yells at him. “I trusted you with my friend’s secrets and you used them to help yourfriendhere to bring her down.”
With the way she spits out the wordfriend, it is obvious that she’s not impressed with me, not anymore.
“He didn’t do anything, Carrie,” I start.
When she turns angry eyes my way, I stop talking. James leans sideways in his seat to give me a warning signal. Abort whatever I was just about to say.
“I cannot believe this,” Carrie gets to the point. She paces back and forth, although the small space doesn’t allow for much of that. “I cannot believe the nerve on you, Cal Prentice, to play these games with my best friend when you knew very well how she felt about you.”
The reminder of Evie’s teenage crush on me makes me cringe. I was such an asshole to her. There were plenty of ways to let her down easy in a nice way. Unfortunately, that was not my style back then.
“That’s all in the past, Carrie,” I make sure to remind her. “Evie was over it…”
“But that’s the problem,” Carrie cuts me off. “She never got over it.” The smile freezes on my face. “And you know what’s funny? When she got that first message from the app, she was describing the person to me. I told her it sounded like she was into all the guys who were just like you.”
“I…”
“I just didn’t know that it was actually you,” she almost yells now. “And you,” she turns to her boyfriend. “Next time you have a brilliant idea like this, where you feel the need to meddle into someone else’s relationship, just don’t,” she instructs him. “You leave that shit to me, okay? Because I actually know what I’m doing.”
“Understood,” James responds right away, sounding nothing like the self-assured and calm guy I’ve always known him to be.
Carrie takes a break for a minute to make sure the baby is okay when a small whimper sounds from the direction of the stroller.
“I’m probably traumatizing my baby with my yelling at you two,” Carrie mumbles. “Poor kid will be dreaming about this, end up with PTSD, and he’ll never understand why.”
