My Girlfriend Slept With My Best Friend First novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Stoop

Shane shuts the door on Devin. His sister Jo makes Devin sit on the stoop with her thermos, hears the voice message and tells him he sleeps on her couch. The dinner video has already gone online.

Shane lived in the bottom half of a brick duplex ten minutes from the restaurant.

I walked the whole way in the rain without feeling it.

His porch light was on.

I knocked until my knuckles stung.

The door opened a few inches, still on its chain.

Shane stood there in his old Beaver Falls jacket with his phone in his hand.

His face was gray.

"Devin," he said.

"Is it true?"

He looked at the porch boards.

"Not tonight."

"Shane."

"Please." His voice cracked on it. "Not tonight, man. I can't."

He shut the door.

I heard the deadbolt turn, and then I heard nothing.

I stood there and waited for him to come back and say it was a joke, that Megan had been drunk, that he would explain everything.

The light behind the curtain went off.

I sat down on the stoop because my legs wanted to.

Four years ago he had come to my grandfather's wake in Ohio, stood beside me and held my shoulders while I cried.

He had left early, saying he had to be back for a game.

He had been in her bed by midnight.

Footsteps came down the stairs on the outside of the building, the ones that led to the upper apartment.

A woman in navy scrubs stopped on the landing and looked at me.

She had a hospital lanyard around her neck and a steel thermos in one hand.

Shane's sister Jo.

I had met her maybe six times in nine years. She was always on her way to a shift or coming home from one.

"You're soaked," she said.

"I'm fine."

"You're sitting in a puddle, Devin."

I looked down.

I was.

She came down the last steps and unscrewed the thermos cap, and the smell of black coffee came out into the cold.

She poured some into the cap and held it out.

I took it.

"Where's Megan?" she asked.

"At a restaurant. Telling people."

"Telling them what?"

I drank some of the coffee. It was bitter and hot.

"That Shane was her first," I said. "Four years ago. The night of her birthday."

Jo did not say anything.

She stood very still, with the thermos in her hand.

It was not the face of someone hearing a thing for the first time.

I noticed it and I did not know what to do with it.

"She said it at the table in front of everybody," I said. "She smiled the whole time."

"Did Shane say anything?"

"He shut the door on me."

Jo breathed out through her nose.

"Okay."

I took out my phone because I wanted someone to hear it.

"She sent me this by accident. It was meant for him."

I played the voice message.

Megan's low laugh came out of the little speaker.

Round three to me.

You lose.

You're coming to Lisbon on my flight.

Don't forget what you owe me.

Jo took the phone out of my hand without asking.

She played it again.

Then she played it a third time, with her eyes shut.

When she opened them, they were wet, and she was angry.

"What does she mean, what he owes her?"

"I don't know."

"What round?"

"I don't know that either. She and Shane have had some game since high school. They used to dare each other to eat things."

"Dare each other," Jo said, flat.

She handed the phone back.

"Get up."

"I'm okay here."

"You're not. You're shaking, you're wet through, and there is a couch ten feet over our heads that nobody is using."

"I can go home."

"Is it home?" she asked. "With her things in it?"

I had no answer.

Jo picked up my bag from the step. I hadn't known I'd brought it.

"Couch," she said. "Tonight. We'll fight about everything else when you've slept."

I followed her up the outside stairs.

On the landing she stopped, turned and looked at the door downstairs.

For a moment I thought she might go back down and knock on it herself.

Then she unlocked her own door.

Her apartment was small and warm and smelled of laundry soap.

She gave me a towel and a pair of gray sweatpants, and a blanket from the back of the couch.

My phone buzzed in my pocket while I was pulling the sweatpants on.

It was a link from a boy in my engineering section I barely knew.

The video from the dinner.

Somebody had posted it under the name of Megan's program, with a caption that said: his reaction when she told the truth.

It had nine thousand views.

Megan had left a comment under it already.

A red heart, and the words: Love you, babe.

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