Frenemies(35)

My head spun, and it was suddenly hard to breathe. Nate had called me, repeatedly. Had he and Helen broken up? He would have said that, wouldn’t he? No—they probably weren’t broken up, exactly, but things certainly couldn’t be good if he’d spent so many hours calling me, showing up at my apartment, leaving me increasingly emotional messages. I’d thought that Helen had outplayed me, but maybe not, maybe Nate had finally seen the true Helen and realized—

“What’s going on?”

Henry stood, clad only in his boxer-briefs, in the bedroom doorway. He looked rumpled and sexy and too good to be true.

I’d forgotten all about him.

I looked down at my cell phone, and then, just like that, I knew.

Henry must have turned off my ringer. I didn’t really understand why he would do that, but he must have. Nothing else made sense. I couldn’t possibly have missed Nate’s calls all on my own. Life couldn’t be that cruel. Henry had to have done it.

“Did you turn off my ringer?” I demanded.

Henry rubbed a hand across his face, and then eyed me. Warily.

“It was good for me, too,” he said. “I particularly like that thing you do with your—”

“My phone!” I brandished it at him. “It was on the couch. Did you do it? Did you maliciously turn off the ringer?”

“I’m very rarely malicious with phones, Gus. This is because they’re inanimate objects.”

“Damn you!” I shouted at him, and winged the phone at his head.

Luckily for Henry, I had about as much aim as I had maturity. Which was to say, none. The phone missed him entirely, hit the wall, and split apart. Linus barked in the direction of the battery case, but otherwise didn’t move.

The moment the phone had left my fingers, I realized I was acting like a crazy person. Of course Henry hadn’t messed with my cell phone. Why would he? I had probably sat on it. But it was too late to do anything about that now. I was just another one of his lunatic girls. I wasn’t sure why that made me feel worse.

I hid my face in my hands, and wished that one of us would disappear. I didn’t care who.

It was quiet for a long time.

“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” he asked eventually.

I really didn’t.

“It has nothing to do with you,” I mumbled.

“I know that,” Henry bit out. Surprised, I looked up to see temper written all over his face. “Do you want to know how I know it has nothing to do with me? Because I was asleep.”

I wanted to apologize, but I couldn’t seem to form the words. He looked at me for a long moment, and when I couldn’t take it any more I muttered something about my hair and fled to the bathroom.

When I came back out, the sun was up and he was gone.


I took a long nap on the couch and when I woke up, I still felt that heaviness, like I might cry at any moment.

I shouldn’t have let things happen with Henry. Again. I could rationalize accidentally sleeping with Henry when out of my right mind with grief and Jack Daniel’s. It had been a bad mistake, but understandable under the circumstances. But how could I rationalize last night? How could I possibly have done such a thing to Georgia?

It didn’t matter that she had never touched Henry, that he had never thought about her that way, that she wasn’t even a blip on his romantic radar. The fact that those things were true made what I had done worse. Cardinal rule number two was that you didn’t touch the men who caused your friends emotional trauma. Ever. No matter what.

No wonder I felt bad about myself. What made it all hurt a little bit more was that there had been something sweet about everything that had happened with Henry. I could still see that look he’d had from time to time—if I hadn’t known better, I might have thought it was tenderness.

But that was impossible. That wasn’t who Henry was.

I shook it off and called Nate, which was what really mattered. Or anyway, was the only thing I had the tools to deal with. I would just file Henry away and forget about it. He and Helen were just a phase Nate and I once went through. Just a phase that didn’t bear repeating, and one Georgia would never hear about.

Nate picked up on the third ring.

“Hey there,” he said.

“Hi.” I felt shy and giddy all at once.

“I think I owe you an apology,” he said, his voice ripe with merriment. “I drank way too much last night and I have the terrible feeling I left some drunk, incoherent message for you. I did, didn’t I?”

“Well,” I said, taken aback. “There were seven messages, actually, and they weren’t incoh—”

“I told Helen this is what happens when she’s not around to keep me on a leash,” Nate said with a chuckle. “Sorry, dude!”

He was with Helen at that very moment. And he was pretending I was a guy.

I was so stunned by this, I fell silent.

I could hear Helen laughing in the background. The familiar horsiness of that laughter made my stomach twist.

“Okay then,” Nate said, as if I’d continued to joke about the drunken message he’d left in some parallel reality where this awful conversation wasn’t breaking my heart. Again. “Just delete it, and we’ll pretend it never happened, okay? Cool. Later.”

And he hung up.