I Slept With My Ex's Best Friend novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Next Door

I pulled out of the hug.

Tanner was already turning to the crowd, waving, saying, "Thank you, everybody, really. I just want her to be happy."

I walked away from him with twenty-seven hundred dollars in my account and a date in my head.

March twelfth.

I opened my calendar on the walk home and scrolled back to it.

A Thursday.

The night before my pharmacology midterm.

There was nothing else written there.

Jace came over that night with Thai food and his face fell the second he saw mine.

"I saw the video," he said. "You made him pay rent on camera. That's the best thing I've ever seen."

"What happened on March twelfth?"

He stopped in the doorway with the bag in his hand.

All the color went out of him.

It was like watching a light go off in a window.

"He told you the date," he said.

"He whispered it in my ear while two hundred people filmed him hugging me. What happened?"

He set the bag down on the counter very carefully.

"Saturday," he said. "I promised you everything on Saturday. That's part of everything."

"Jace."

"I'm not going to tell you in pieces in your kitchen with Tanner's voice still in your ear." His jaw was tight. "I'll tell you all of it. In order. On the drive home. You can get out of the truck at any exit you want."

I should have pushed harder.

I know that.

But he looked so sure, and so sick, and I'd already said yes to Saturday.

So I let him stay, and we ate the Thai food, and he didn't say much, and I didn't either.

Saturday we drove up to Green Bay in the green truck with a sheet cake on my lap.

His mom's house was a small yellow ranch at the end of a cul-de-sac with a bird feeder in the front yard and a hand-painted sign on the porch that said THE THORSENS, WIPE YOUR FEET.

Next door was a house three times its size.

Brick, with white columns and a four-car garage and a fountain in the middle of a circular drive.

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