A Summer to Remember(51)
I laughed out loud at this assessment because it was completely and honestly true.
“Mmm, look what the cat dragged in,” a haughty voice announced in a not too conversational tone of voice.
Both Talia and I looked up to see Ashley and her cousin, Imogen. If I never saw these two ever again, I could live a long and prosperous life without a shred of regret.
“Christ on a cracker—what the f*ck do you want?” Talia wondered in her rudest voice with a south Boston accent so thick, I’d almost forgotten she’d spent the first decade of her life there.
“Very nice,” Imogen began in that annoying English accent I was beginning to hate with a vengeance. “Is that how ladies talk or just common street trash whose mother happened to land a jackpot of a man?”
“Fuck you, you uptight Limey whore. You think you’re too high and mighty to earn a ‘reputation’? Welcome to America, bitch. According to my sources, most of the men you’ve f*cked have formed the general consensus you’re a lousy f*cking lay and fake orgasms quite terribly.”
I continued to nurse my wine because this was not a discussion I wanted to get into by any stretch of the imagination. It was best if I kept out of it because both Imogen and Ashley could cut deep when they wanted to hurt someone. The only difference was Talia was more or less bullet proof.
Ashley raised a perfectly manicured eyebrow before her blue eyes made direct contact with mine. “By the way, I would grill Paul very closely about the retreat in Stamford. I’m not one to spread gossip but let’s just say he wasn’t exactly on his best behavior.”
I swear at that moment I wanted to do something really ghetto like stand up and knock the shit out of that smug bitch. However, my parents’ raised a proper young woman who didn’t behave like that so I smiled rather ingratiatingly before I turned my head toward Talia and pretended Ashley wasn’t there.
“What looks good for dessert?” I questioned my best friend.
“I know because it was the two of us getting busy underneath the sheets,” Ashley declared before she walked off with her cousin and turned to me at the last minute with a smirk on her face.
The lying bitch. Paul wouldn’t touch her with a ten foot pole and she had to be telling me this just to get a reaction out of me but I refused to fall for the bait. That would have been too easy. However, I didn’t even have a quick, witty retort prepared therefore the WASP cunt still ended up having the last word and that pissed me off to no avail.
“Tell me you don’t believe a word of what she said,” Talia said in a low voice. “She’s lying and only trying to get a rise out of you. Paul isn’t that way and he would never hurt you.”
“I know,” I merely replied.
However an icy exterior had already started to form around a heart filled with a love so pure and true for Paul and I had already felt myself beginning to go numb. I wanted to have faith and believe the best of him but I emotionally had already begun to prepare for the worst.
Chapter Eighteen
I didn’t drop by Paul’s apartment until Talia and I had a long talk and she agreed I should spend the night with my significant other and definitely not with her.
My attitude took me by surprise because I couldn’t believe I felt any resentment toward Paul at all. It couldn’t have been true. For God’s sake, the man had texted me as soon as he was back in the City and the only reason why he hadn’t bothered to call was because he knew Talia and I were spending the day together.
I arrived with only my expensive Hermès Birkin black leather handbag, mostly because he had given me my own closet space and I kept spare clothes, shoes and toiletries at his apartment. There was no need for the back and forth with the overnight bags. In fact, Talia had helped me move my stuff to his home the day before since I had a key and knew the doorman and concierge.
That evening, I said hello to both men before I boarded the elevator and took the ride up to his apartment. I felt like a caged rat and began to pace while trying to convince myself that there had to be some kind of explanation for what had happened between him and Ashley, if anything had happened at all.
I found it hard to believe he could have cheated on me when my brother and Savannah attended the same retreat and even if Jude shared his loyalty to his best friend, my best friend would have definitely called me up and told me what was going on.
This calmed me down a bit and as the elevator doors opened on his floor, I felt better as I walked to his apartment, only one of two on this floor because it was the floor before the penthouse suites. This apartment had been in his family for many, many years. There was a time when the Co-op wouldn’t take applications from Jews, blacks or Italians. Of course times had changed but not so much. It was still a very WASPish building and most of the owners were white and could either trace their heritage back to the goddamn Mayflower, Pennsylvania Dutch or wealthy French families who had no wish to live in the colony that would eventually become Quebec.