I Slept With My Ex's Best Friend novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Serenade

Kenzie was gone before I could ask anything else, slipping back through the crowd with her cat tail bouncing.

I found Jace by the fry stand.

"What did you do last spring?" I said.

He was holding a paper boat of fries out to me.

He lowered it slowly.

"Kenzie," he said.

"Tanner's planning something for the town hall. He won't say what. He says it ends us both."

Somebody bumped into me in a dinosaur suit and apologized.

Jace pulled me out of the stream of people, into the doorway of a closed phone store.

"Last spring I was stupid for him," he said. "I did something I'm not proud of."

"What?"

"It's mine to tell you. Not his. And I'm going to tell you."

"Then tell me."

He looked out at State Street, at a thousand people in costumes screaming along to a song.

"Not here. Not in a tree costume."

He looked back at me.

"Saturday's my mom's fiftieth. Well, forty-seventh. She says fiftieth to get more cake. Come to Green Bay with me. I'll tell you on the drive home. Everything."

"Why not now?"

"Because I want you to meet her first," he said. "Before you decide what you think of me."

That was such a strange, honest thing to say that I said yes.

On Monday I had a pharmacology lab until four.

When I came out of the nursing building, there were two hundred people on the lawn.

I thought it was a fire drill.

Then I saw the guitar.

Tanner was standing on the low stone wall by the bike racks, in a cream cable-knit sweater, with an acoustic guitar and a little portable amp.

His campaign guy had the real camera on a tripod.

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