My So-Called Sex Life (How to Date, #1)(21)

Great. Just great. This trip is going to be so much worse than I’d thought.





10





SCHADENFREUDE


Hazel

I’m an asshole.

I need to apologize for my big, stupid mouth.

But that’s a little like asking a dog to meow. It’s not a natural skill for me.

I’m still working through how to do it when Axel returns from his call ten minutes later, slumps into a seat across from me at the gate, and drags a hand down his face.

My throat tightens. I messed up badly. I shouldn’t have said that to him. I crossed a line, and now I’ll have to uncross it.

As the gate agent barks announcements, I rehearse options this time.

Sorry I was rude, but I thought you’d want to get as far away as possible from a lying pig. My bad for not realizing you’d stayed with him.

Sorry I said your agent’s scum. Of course you’re not scum for working with scum.

Sorry. You can work with whoever you want, but how could you stay with him when you knew that about him? Oh, right, because romance is bullshit.

But none of those will work. Because they aren’t real apologies. They’re unapologies.

Why is saying sorry so hard?

“In five minutes, we’ll begin boarding our flight to Rome. We will board by group. Please check your boarding passes so you can board when your group is called,” the agent warbles.

Okay, I know this plot device. It’s the ticking clock. I have five minutes to choose a path to apology. I should apologize before we board, especially in case we die on the plane. No one wants to die with apologies on their tongue.

But apologizing is like learning French. It’s complicated and requires new neural pathways, and new emotional ones too. When I was in grade school, my father would lash out at my mother when he came home from the local university after teaching English all day. He’d tell her she was toasting the bread wrong, slicing the cucumber wrong, cleaning the sink wrong.

The next morning, he’d say he was sorry for being such a perfectionist, but he just liked things done the right way. She understood, right? He’d kiss her and that was the end of his apology.

The English professor in him was a perfectionist with Veronica and me too. He wanted his two daughters to learn the difference between among and between, affect and effect, peak and peek and pique.

If we didn’t nail them, we’d have to write the correct usage down one hundred times.

There were no morning apologies for us.

Never. Not one.

I’m so glad my mother left him before I became a total asshole.

“And now we’ll begin boarding our first-class passengers,” the agent says, and the crowds at Gate Eighteen stretch and rise.

I grab my backpack, and Axel hoists up his messenger bag. We head to the gate kiosk, but I don’t say a word to him, and he doesn’t seem keen on speaking to me. This is worse than I’d thought. The silence cloaks us as we line up, like we’re marching down the gangplank.

With no real map, I’m going to have to wing this apology. Once the attendant scans our boarding passes, I draw a fueling breath. I’ll do my mea culpa as we walk along the jetway. I turn my gaze to Axel, ready to say I’m sorry, but he’s chatting with the guy next to him. “Oh, that’s a good one. Your mind will be blown.”

A forty-something guy in khakis and a corporate polo—that’s my best guess since the insignia on the chest reads Aviano and that sounds tech-y—is clutching a hardback of The Girl in the Hotel.

That’s Vince Caine’s latest thriller, which has been climbing the charts for weeks now.

“Good to know,” the tech guy says gratefully, waggling the book. “But hopefully not too good. I need to sleep on this trip.”

Axel laughs. “Then you’re going to have to switch to the news, my man. This is a page-turner,” he says, pointing to the tale.

The man curses under his breath, but it’s aw-shucks style. “Oh, well. What’s sleep for anyway? I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

“Until then, there are books,” Axel says.

And damn, it’s cute how Axel talks to fellow readers. Like he’s just another reader too.

As we shuffle down the jetway, they chat more behind me, trading recommendations on favorite romantic thrillers until the guy asks, “And have you read A Lovely Alibi?”

I smile at the mention of one of Axel’s books. But I fight off the urge to spin around and point at him gleefully while shouting, That’s his! He wrote it! Remember the scene at the gala in Barcelona where the hero dances with the heroine while she’s still wearing a knife in her garter like the badass she is?

I stay quiet while Axel hums doubtfully. “Hmm. I’m not sure I have.”

“Oh man, you have to. That’s the one where the hero commandeers a Jeep in Barcelona to chase down a thief of rare antiquities. He nabs him, then takes his woman out dancing after. He’s so smooth,” the guy says, admiring a fictional hero that my friend—ahem, former friend—crafted artfully.

“I’ll have to check it out,” Axel says.

“Huxley. Axel Huxley. But don’t blame me when you’re up too late,” the tech guy says as we reach the galley.

“I won’t,” Axel answers.