I Slept With My Ex's Best Friend novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Half

I didn't let her see me.

I went back to the living room and held the baby and smiled at an aunt, and when we left at seven, his mom hugged me at the door for a long time.

"You come back," she said. "Whatever happens."

Whatever happens.

We were twenty minutes south on 41 in the dark when I said, "Pull over."

Jace looked at me.

"There's a rest stop in six miles."

"Then pull over in six miles."

He did.

The rest stop was a brick bathroom building, a vending machine glowing in the dark, and a parking lot with two semis idling at the far end.

He parked under a light and turned off the engine.

The truck ticked as it cooled.

"Your mom asked somebody if I know yet," I said. "About the spring. So now it's not just Tanner. Your mother knows. What do I not know?"

He put both hands on the wheel.

He looked straight ahead through the windshield, at the vending machine.

"In February," he said, "I found out Tanner was cheating on you."

The words sat in the cab.

I'd known something was coming.

Somehow I hadn't known it would be that.

"Who?"

"A girl on the dance team. A junior. I don't know her well."

"Since when?"

"January, maybe. I found out the second week of February. I saw them in his car outside her building."

"And you told him what?"

"I told him to end it. I told him if he didn't end it, I'd tell you." His knuckles were white on the wheel. "He swore it was over. He swore it was one time. He cried, Linnea. In my studio. He said he'd lose you and he'd lose everything and he'd never do it again."

"And March twelfth?"

He shut his eyes.

"It wasn't over," he said. "March twelfth, I knew where he was. He was with her. And I didn't tell you."

My whole body went hot and then cold.

"Nine months," I said. "You sat across from me at dinner for nine months."

"Yes."

"You came to my birthday. You helped carry my couch up the stairs in August."

"Yes."

"Why?"

He finally turned and looked at me.

"Because I'd known him since I was eight, and he begged me," he said. "Because I thought it would kill you. Because I thought if I was the one who told you, it would look like I was waiting for my turn."

"Were you?"

He didn't flinch.

"I didn't think I'd ever get one," he said. "That's not the same thing."

I got out of the truck.

I walked across the parking lot to the vending machine because I had to walk somewhere.

The November wind came straight off the fields and went right through my jacket.

I stood in front of the glowing glass looking at a row of peanut butter crackers.

Two years.

He'd known for nine months of it.

He'd passed me the salt.

I heard the truck door, and then his boots on the asphalt, and then he stopped a few feet behind me and didn't come closer.

"You can hate me," he said. "You're allowed."

"I don't hate you." I turned around. "I'm furious with you. That's different."

"Okay."

"You should have told me."

"I know."

"You should have told me in February."

"I know."

"Stop saying you know!"

"Then tell me what to say."

I looked at him under that buzzing light.

His eyes were wet.

He wasn't hiding it.

Tanner had cried on purpose a hundred times in two years, and I'd always known when he was doing it.

Jace wasn't doing it on purpose.

He looked like a man standing in front of a firing squad he'd built himself.

And it was silence.

That was the thing I kept coming back to.

It was cowardice. It was loyalty to the wrong person. It was ugly and it was wrong.

But it wasn't him running the lie.

"Take me to your place," I said.

He blinked.

"Not mine. Gretchen's home. I'm not doing this in front of Gretchen."

"Doing what?"

"Yelling at you some more," I said. "And then I don't know."

The studio was cold when we got in. He turned up the space heater and stood by it with his jacket still on.

I yelled at him some more.

He took it.

He didn't defend himself once.

I told him he was a coward, and he said yes.

I told him I'd trusted him more than anybody in that house, and he said he knew that, and that was the worst part.

I told him he should've just said it, in February, in one sentence, and he said, "Linnea, he's cheating on you," out loud in the cold room, nine months late.

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