Page 16 of Due Process
Especially when my phone finally pinged with an alert from the bank, letting me know that a transaction had been processed.
My rib cage slowly deflated as the breath I was holding hissed out through clenched teeth—my plans were coming to fruition.
I love being right.
“Stella? Did you listen to anything I just said?” Curtis asked.
I was thrust back into the present, my best friend sitting across from me as we held our “business meeting” at one of our companies’ common restaurants. Really, I just wanted an excuse not to have lunch with my overbearing husband.
“Shit, sorry. What did you say?”
Curtis smirked before he shook his head. “Nothing important, it seems.”
I flicked his bicep with the back of my hand. “Hit me.”
He caught my fingers in his, squeezed for a moment, then laid my palm flat against the table ever so gently. “I thought we established this,Smelly Stella. You don’t hit people when you’re frustrated.”
I rolled my eyes at his teasing tone as my thoughts travelled back to our childhood days.
We were both seven and placed in the same class when Curtis, the popular kid, thought he’d dub me the illustrious title, Smelly Stella. However, with my rambunctious nature and winning personality, there was no other way to answer that insult than with a swift karate chop to the face. Except my finger slipped and poked him in the eye.
Both of us had to be picked up from the school nurse shortly after. Curtis swore he had lost his vision, his right eye red and watering. Whereas I couldn’t stop crying, terrified that I had blinded him and he’d have to wear an eye patch for the rest of his life.
Our dads arrived to pick us up at the same time. They immediately hit it off and became best friends, which in turn trickled down to the next generation—us.
I chuckled, reminiscing over those carefree days. “Serves you right for picking on me, you big bully.”
His brown eyes twinkled in mirth. “How else was I supposed to get your attention?”
“Get my attention? Hmm, maybe, ‘Hi, do you want to play on the playground with me?’”
“I had the emotional intelligence of a rock, Stella. And to make it worse, I had a crush onthefamous Dylan Foster’s daughter. But did you really have to poke my eye out?”
My mind stalled on that one word. “Crush...?”
Curtis chuckled as if that new information wasn’t sending a weird electrical reaction through my brain. “Yeah… why’d you think I teased you in the first place? Don’t tell me Eli hasn’t done something silly over a girl…” He stopped, contemplating my shy firstborn and his quiet personality, then pivoted. “Better yet, that sounds more like a Phoenix thing.”
I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. I was still stuck on his newfound revelation.
“Crush?” I repeated.
He smirked. “Why are you acting like you never knew?”
“Because I didn’t.”Or did I?
Curtis was a severely honest person, even to the point of near hurting one’s feelings. He never would have intentionally hidden that from me. Which meant that I didn’t pick up on the signs.
Flashing images recalled from my memory, forcing me to see our past through a different lens.
A slight phrase here. An innocent touch there. A shared moment of care.
In that brief moment of a single spoken word, my entire friendship was cracked open for review.
If only I had the mental fortitude to follow through. Instead, my emotional capacity could only focus on one person at a time. And that just happened to be my soon-to-be ex-husband.
Which brought me back to why I had asked Curtis out for lunch in the first place.
“Everything alright, Stells?”
