Yours Truly (Part of Your World, #2)(95)

Oh my God, see, this was my problem. I couldn’t even focus.

I looked down at my candle. The wick was crooked. I’d been making this thing with the only two brain cells that hadn’t been dedicated to the sex tape I was rewatching in my head.

I was a mess. How could I be harmless to him when I couldn’t even be harmless to myself?

Some little part of me said that maybe if we started a sexual relationship, it would lead to more. Maybe he would eventually get over Amy and fall in love with me. We were already friends, we had physical chemistry. A lot of chemistry. Like, a disproportionate amount. We didn’t have love, but that was still two out of three, right?

Pathetic.

Imagine trying to talk yourself into a friends-with-benefits situation in which you were head-over-heels in love and you knew he was actively wishing you were someone else.

I hated myself.

My sulking was disrupted when some drunk woman named Shannon who’d been talking too loudly and wearing a maid of honor hat stood up and clinked her fork to the side of her glass. Everyone looked up from their project.

“A toast!” she bellowed.

She was barely able to stand. This oughta be good.

Amy smiled and everyone lifted their cocktails.

Shannon swayed for another moment. “To Amy,” she slurred, holding up her martini. “A woman who would have been married years ago if Jacob hadn’t strung her along! Huzzah!”

The party fell into an instant hush.

Amy set her mocktail down. “Shannon, that’s not true—”

Shannon scoffed. “What do you mean??? It so is?! He lost the best thing that ever happened to him because he’s too anxious to function.” She laughed at her own joke.

All my jumbled, discombobulated emotions suddenly jerked to attention and honed in on her like a laser.

“He functions just fucking fine,” I snapped.

The room collectively gasped. Shannon blinked at me like she’d just realized that I was here. She peered around red-eyed, looking for allies. She didn’t see any.

“What?” she said, throwing up a hand. “He didn’t even go in the limo. What man can’t handle a bachelor party?”

I set my untouched drink down with a clink and glared at her. “He has social anxiety. You expect him to come to some loud-ass limo party with your verbal-diarrhea husbands, and you wonder why he didn’t suddenly turn into some social butterfly? He should get credit for even trying. You have no idea how hard he has to work to just fucking show up. And he does it because that’s what love does—it shows up. He’s shown up for Amy and his brother since the second this started. He has been a goddamn saint through all of this. He is not the asshole. You’re the asshole.”

Jafar squawked, “ASSHOLE!” from somewhere under the kitchen table.

Every mouth in the room was open. Amy was wide-eyed, Jane was red, Jill was nodding, Jewel looked like I had her vote for president, and Joy was stifling a grin.

I stared down Shannon until she looked away first. Then I pulled the keys out of my purse, got up, and left.

I drove to the gas station down the street, bought seven different kinds of candy bars, a pack of cigarettes, and a lighter. Then I drove back to the house, snuck in through the garage door, and went straight for the sunroom, where Grandpa watched TV.

“What the hell do you want?” he muttered when I came in.

“Give me any crap and I’ll change my mind.”

I wheeled him out the sliding glass doors and into the screened-in gazebo in the wooded part of the yard.

I took off his oxygen, moved his tank, opened the pack of cigarettes, and held one out in front of him just out of reach.

“I know you’re of sound mind, so I know you understand when I say that if you choose to take this, it may worsen your lung condition. You would be smoking against my medical advice and probably to your detriment.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Shut up and give it to me.”

I rolled my eyes, lit the cigarette, and handed it to him. Then I dropped into a chair and started eating a Snickers like it was a burrito.

The old man eyed me. “Tough night?”

“You have no idea.”

He took a long draw on his cigarette and blew the smoke in rings. “You having trouble with my grandson? Want me to straighten him out?”

I snorted. “Can you make him love me?”

“Doesn’t he already?”

“No,” I said. “No, he doesn’t.”

He took another puff. “And here I was thinkin’ he was the smart one.”

He finished his cigarette and I gave him another one. I opened a Milky Way and sat there eating it while I stared through the screen into the dark abyss of the yard, contemplating all my questionable life choices.

Jacob never said he loved me back.

I said it to him so many times and not once did he say “You too.” But he did let me know he thinks of me when he jerks off. I’d be absolutely thrilled about this if he also happened to be in love with me as well.

If I had any question about what this was for him, that was my answer.

I had to bury my face in my hands.

This was my fault. All of it.

He’d been crystal clear with me since the beginning, that he was in love with someone else. This was completely on me.

Maybe if I hadn’t gone off and told Amy that Jacob and I were living together, I wouldn’t have moved in there and wouldn’t be so worn down from seeing him in gray sweatpants every day.