He Cheated With My Best Friend, So I Spent the Night With His Brother novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Call
Preston butt-dials Margot mid-sex with her best friend, she records it, and she asks a stranger at the bar to take her somewhere.
At eleven on a Friday night, my phone lit up with my fiancé's name, and I heard him in bed with my best friend.
I was alone at the end of a bar by the river, with a ginger ale and a napkin I had shredded into a pile.
My engagement brunch was in twelve hours.
I picked up the call to ask him why he was ringing me this late.
Nobody spoke.
There was a rustle of sheets, and then a woman's breath, close to the phone.
"Preston, stop," she said. "What if Margot finds out?"
I knew that voice.
It was soft and breathless and it belonged to Brooke, who had texted me two hours earlier: Going to bed, face mask on, love you, see you at brunch!
"Margot?" Preston said easily. "She's asleep by nine. She won't notice a thing."
I pressed the phone to my ear and tried not to smile.
For two months I had been looking for a way out of this engagement, and I had found nothing.
Now it was talking to me.
"Promise me you won't touch her after the wedding," Brooke whispered.
"Have you seen her? I'd rather kiss the wall."
Brooke giggled. "You're terrible."
I knew that giggle.
Twelve years of sleepovers. She had never sounded that happy at any of my birthdays.
I hit record.
My thumb was steady, which surprised me.
I held the phone against my ear for six more minutes.
I heard the headboard.
I heard him say her name over and over.
Then the line went dead, and the recording saved.
The bartender slid a fresh ginger ale in front of me without being asked.
"Bad news?" he said.
"The best news I've had all year."
I turned the ring on my finger.
It was half a size too big, so I wore it with a strip of tape folded inside the band. Preston's mother had said it was a family ring and nobody would be cutting it down to fit a girl.
Constance Greaves said everything kindly, with a hand on my arm.
Two years ago our families were supposed to have a first dinner together, and the Greaveses canceled it an hour before.
They sent Preston to the second one.
By then the Greaveses had lent my father, Raymond Haldane, three hundred and eighty thousand dollars to keep our hardware store open after the flood.
Nobody ever said the loan and the wedding were connected.
Everyone in Marietta knew they were.
If I broke the engagement, Constance would call the note, and my father would lose the store he had painted every spring for thirty-one years.
A recording was not enough to fight that.
Constance would call it a mistake, or a fake, or a girl's jealousy, and she would say it kindly.
I needed more than four minutes of audio.
I needed time, and a plan, and one night in which nothing belonged to the Greaves family.
"You've got a look," said a man two stools down.
He had been there when I came in. He was nursing a beer and reading nothing on his phone.
He was big in the shoulders, in a black jacket worn at the elbows, with dark hair going gray at the temples and a short beard.
There was a white scar across one knuckle.
"What look?" I said.
"The look of someone who just won something and can't tell anyone."
I laughed, and it came out too loud.
"Dominic," he said. "Dom, mostly. I flew in this afternoon, and I don't know a soul in this town."
"Then you're the only one," I said.
I did not give him my name. I did not want it in my mouth tonight.
In twelve hours I would put on a yellow dress and stand beside Preston while his mother raised a glass.
Brooke would hug me and tell me I was glowing.
I would smile.
But for the next twelve hours, not one person was going to decide anything for me.
I slid off the stool and picked up my jacket.
"Dom," I said. "I'm engaged, and my fiancé is sleeping with my best friend. I'd like one night that's mine."
He did not look away or look shocked.
He looked at my ring, and then he looked at my face.
"You're sure," he said.
"I've never been surer of anything."
My phone buzzed on the bar.
It was Brooke, again, sweet as ever: Sleep tight, babe! Tomorrow's going to be perfect.
I turned the phone face down.
"Take me somewhere," I said.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend