Wherever It Leads(62)

“Oh, no, my beautiful friend. Don’t even try it.”

I slump back into the sofa.

“Spill it,” she demands.

“Well, Grant was waiting on me when I got there.” I search for the words to describe everything. “It was just . . . weird, Pres.”

“Why? Because you haven’t seen him in so long? That’s normal.”

“Yeah, because of that, I guess. But it was more than that. He seemed so . . . was he this immature when I dated him?”

The wine sloshes in the glass as she laughs. “Yeah, Brynnie. He was.”

I shake my head. “I didn’t remember him like that. He talks about racing and cards and the same old stupid stuff. You know?”

She grins knowingly. “So, basically, you’re comparing him to Fenton?”

“No!”

“Yeah, you are.”

I release a breath. “Yeah, I guess I am. It’s amazing how different he seems now. But a part of me wishes I hadn’t gone. He had nothing. He tricked me into seeing him and I let him. But it won’t happen again.”

“You needed to hear him out,” Presley says, “But, yeah, don’t go again.”

“He wanted me to go home with him.”

“Thank God you didn’t!”

“There was no chance,” I laugh. “It’s just strange that after all the years we spent together, I feel absolutely, positively nothing towards him. Nothing. Not one iota. Especially since he cheated on me and is tied up in this Brady thing, I still expected to feel something. I did the other times I’ve seen him, you know? But I don’t now.”

“Compared to Cashmere, how could you?” she laughs. “This is one of the reasons I thought you needed to see Grant. For closure, yeah. But also to see if you even liked him, because Brady will come home and it would be so easy to fall back into old habits. Before they left for Zimbabwe, you were living in this bubble of missing something that maybe seemed a lot better because you were seeing it through break-up goggles.”

“Wait a minute. Break-up goggles?”

“Yeah. Like beer goggles. Only this is a skewed view of a relationship after you get dumped. Things are always remembered better after the fact. Like when someone dies and in reality they were a complete *. Have you ever heard the eulogies? No one says that. No one says, ‘Uncle Gerald was a complete dick that grabbed my ass last Christmas and cheated on Aunt Mildred a hundred times and drank entirely too much.’ Instead it’s all, ‘He was a saint that lived a humble life of love and giving. God broke the mold with the benevolent Uncle G.’“

I choke on my wine. “Where do you get this stuff? And I wasn’t dumped.”

“It just comes to me. It’s a gift,” she winks. “But the point’s the same. I think you’ve just realized that your relationship with Grant wasn’t what you thought it was.”

“For sure,” I say, catching my breath. “I know now, after being with Fent, how different things can be.”

“So you’ve properly rebounded! I knew you could do it!”

“Will you shut up?”

She rolls her eyes and tosses a lock of hair behind her ear. She doesn’t pop me with a quick retort and that catches me off guard. I watch her, perplexed, before she leaps off the chair and disappears into the kitchen. Things shuffle around before she comes back with a box of oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies.

“Here,” she says, taking one and stuffing it into her mouth before slamming the box at my chest. “If you’re getting bitchy already, I’ll just get the cookies now.”

“I’m not getting bitchy,” I say, slipping a cookie out of the sleeve. “But if these are raisin and not chocolate chip, I’ll be at nuclear-bitch level in about a half a second.”

“I bought the raisins by accident one time! Get over it. It was an honest mistake.”

“And I about died of raisin ingestion!”

“You’re trying to distract me,” she says, swiping another cookie before settling in her chair again. “And it won’t work. I’m your best friend. Getting the details to everything is a part of our deal.”

“I didn’t know we had a deal.”

“It’s in the girl code. Now get talking and you can even do it with your mouth full and I won’t comment. Even if you spray me with crumbs.”

“You’re so disgusting.”

“Talk.”

I lift the cookie to my lips and take a bite. I chew purposefully before making a point to swallow and then take a long sip of my wine. “Okay. I’m ready.”

“Finally,” she sighs. “Okay, so I’m assuming Grant didn’t have anything important to actually tell you.”

“Nope. Not a thing. Just that he loves me so much and apparently is still into dirt bikes.”

“That weasel!”

“I know,” I say, taking a nibble of my cookie. “But there was a little surprise tonight.”

“What’s that?”

“Fenton showed up.”

“What?” Presley leans forward in her chair and sets her glass on the table. Her jaw hangs open. “At Pano? He was there? Dining?”

I shrug. “He owns it. He conveniently owns the restaurant where Grant and I had dinner. And he just sidles up to the table like it was nothing.