The Dating Experiment (The Experiment, #2)(43)

“First,” she said, “I’m going to say that you and Dom want to murder each other anyway, but that’s just how you work. And, honestly? It makes a hell of a lot more sense now that it’s out in the open about how he feels about you. You fought because you cared about each other but had to keep all that emotion inside, almost all the time.”

Damn it. She was onto something.

“Now that you have it all out in the open, you shouldn’t be at each other’s throats nearly half as much.”

“Well, he has it out in the open. I didn’t do much talking,” I admitted. “And I definitely didn’t tell him completely how I feel, but I think he knows I feel something.”

“At least y’all are catching up to what the rest of us have known for a while.” She shrugged and opened the pizza box. “You’re trying to base your decision on what your relationship is like now, but it’d be totally different. And second, me and Jake work because we’re not together all the time. If we work all day together, we’ll eat lunch together, but spend the evenings apart. He’s not there as much as he used to be, but it’s all balance.”

“Like how you’re here tonight when you should be meeting his family.”

“You should be on a date.”

“I’m having a crisis.”

She wiggled her slice of pizza at me. “And I’m helping with the crisis like a good best friend.” A grin stretched across her face before it dropped, and she put her pizza back into the box. “Honestly, Chlo, I think Dom’s right in a way about you not being willing to try. I think you’re willing; I just think you’ve wanted to be with him for so long that you’re too scared to try.”

And, there it was.

She’d nailed it. She may as well have whacked me on the head with a hammer because that was the goddamn truth.

I’d wanted to be with him for years, and now the prospect was in front of me, it was terrifying.

“You’re right,” I said, picking a stringy bit of cheese on the pizza. “I think…I think I’m so afraid of losing him that I’d rather never have him at all.”

Mellie gave me a sympathetic smile. “Exactly. But is that worth knowing you’ll always have to wonder what could have happened?”

I opened my mouth to answer, then stopped.

I didn’t have an answer.

I couldn’t answer that.

And you know what?

I didn’t want to know the answer.





Chapter Sixteen – Dom


Fuck this. Fuck it. Fuck everything.

Especially fuck that douchebag I stupidly set her up with.

And especially, especially fuck my heart.

Awkward silence reigned supreme in my sister’s living room. Nobody talked. The TV was on, just loud enough that it wasn’t the kind of awkward that made you want to get up and run away, but not so loud it was too much. The scratch of fingers against the bottom of a pizza box broke my concentration of staring into space as I blinked and focused just in enough time to catch Peyton stealing the last slice of my pizza.

She grinned, eyes sparkling, and bit down on the slice.

I shook my head. I wasn’t going to fight her. I didn’t have it in me. The day with Chloe had left me both mentally and physically exhausted, and knowing that she was spending the evening with Warren?

It sucked. I couldn’t believe she’d said those words to me—that I’d poured my soul out to her, told her everything about how I felt, and that had been her response.

In hindsight, she hadn’t said it to be spiteful. I knew that—hell, I knew it then. She’d said it just to tell me, and while her timing had left an awful lot to be desired, I hadn’t given her a chance to explain how it had come around.

I hadn’t given myself a chance not to ask her to go. Even if she refused and said she had to, for whatever reason, I wish like fuck I’d stopped and asked her.

Now, she was probably out with him, and it was eating me inside.

I should never have acknowledged my feelings for her. Never should have gone along with that stupid dating thing. All I’d done was lost and lost again. My date was a bust, and I may well have broken my own goddamn heart in the process.

“So,” Elliott said, wiping his hands on his jeans. “What are you gonna do?”

I glanced at Peyton.

“I know you fucked her,” she said around a mouthful of pizza. “She texted me. Something about a crisis.”

“A crisis? Didn’t sound like a damn crisis when she told me she was seeing Warren tonight.”

Peyton quirked an eyebrow.

“She’s going on a date with him tonight?” Elliott choked on his beer. “What?”

I shrugged a shoulder. “I didn’t hang around to ask. She told me, and I just left.”

“You just left?” Peyton asked.

“That’s the thing you’re bothered about?”

“No, but, I mean, we were drunk when she texted him. As in, Jake made sangria, and we were white-girl wasted to the point that, if we’d been out dancing, we’d have been flashing our asses as we strolled down Bourbon Street.”

“What are you saying?” I narrowed my eyes at her.

“I’m not saying anything.” She held up her hands, but she didn’t look at me. “I’m just saying that she’s probably going out with him because she feels like she has to. That doesn’t mean she wants to. Haven’t you ever been on a date you’d rather gauge out your eyeballs with a rusty fork than go on?”