Chapter 21 21
I shrank back a little at the sheer volume of Sheila’s yell, but the shock of it, the absolute theatrical outrage, almost made me laugh. It was a wild, unhinged sound in the quiet of my room after all the tense whispers and heavy silences.
But then I thought of Mandy’s description from earlier—plastic-faced hyena—and a real, choked laugh did escape me. It was a rusty, surprised sound.
Sheila stared at me, her furious expression melting into confusion. “What’s funny?”
“Well,” I said, wiping at my eye. “Mandy actually classified Angel as a ‘plastic-faced hyena.’ And now you called her ‘plastic-faced’ too. It’s the first time you’ve both ever agreed on describing someone. You two are always saying opposite things.”
Sheila sighed, the fight draining out of her shoulders for a moment. “I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day. But honestly, Ari, it’s not funny.” She huffed, crossing her arms. “You did a lot for that jerk. You took risks. And this is what he does at the end? With her?”
“I guess the plastic-faced Angel was just too pretty to ignore,” I chuckled, but the humor was brittle. Sheila didn’t smile back. Her face remained strict, serious.
I wasn’t surprised by her reaction. Sheila was the only one, besides Mandy, who knew the real lengths I’d gone to for Logan. The secret meetings, the lies to my mother, the constant, low-grade fear of getting caught. She’d been my reluctant accomplice and my loudest critic. She’d always warned me about him, saying his constant affection felt “too perfect, too loving to be true,” and that he might be secretly planning to hurt me precisely because I loved him so much. I’d always brushed her off, called her cynical. Now her “I told you so” hung unspoken in the air, louder than any shout.
She inhaled deeply, her anger shifting into something more like grim sympathy. “I’m sorry you’re facing this. I really am. I should have kept a better eye on that prick. Should have followed him one of those nights he was ‘too busy’ to see you.”
“Nah, forget it,” I said, the weariness settling back into my bones. “This will pass.” I meant it. The sharpest pain had to dull eventually, right?
She looked at me, her dark eyes searching my face, seeing right through the bravado. She opened her mouth, probably to argue, to tell me it was okay to not be okay, when her phone rang—a jarring, upbeat pop song that clashed violently with the mood in the room.
She pulled it from her pocket, glanced at the screen, and her expression transformed back into pure, unadulterated fury. “Oh, the nerve,” she spat. “That douchebag is calling me.”
“No, don’t—” I started, reaching out.
But Sheila was unstoppable when riled. She’d already swiped to answer and put it on speaker before I could finish my sentence.
“You dare call me, huh?” she snarled into the phone, her voice dropping into a register of pure venom I rarely heard. “Don’t you ever fucking call my number again, you spineless, traitorous, sack of maggot-infested garbage! I swear on the moon, if I see your pathetic face, I will punch you so hard in the groin your nonexistent balls will fly out your ears, you mother-fucking, lying piece of shit!”
She didn’t wait for a response. She just ended the call with a stab of her thumb and tossed the phone onto my bed like it was contaminated. She was breathing hard, her chest heaving, her hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. She looked like she was about to vibrate out of her own skin, to shift right there in my bedroom and dart off to tear Logan to literal pieces.
I grabbed her wrist, my grip firm. “Sheila,” I said quietly, my voice a contrast to her storm. “Cool down.”
She looked at me, the wild anger in her eyes battling with the concern she had for me. After a tense moment, she let out a huge, shuddering breath, the fight visibly leaving her. She sat down heavily on the bed next to me and pulled me into a tight, almost desperate hug.
“I’m so sorry,” she mumbled into my hair.
When she pulled back, she was studying my face again. I must have had that look, the one she could always read like a book—the distant, troubled expression that meant something else was chewing on my mind besides the obvious disaster.
“What is it?” she asked, her voice softer now.
“Nothing,” I said, forcing a smile that felt plastic on my face.
She shook her head. “Don’t. Don’t be worried about Logan. He’s not worth a single brain cell.”
“I’m not worried about him,” I said, and it was the truth.
“Then what?”
I sighed, the sound coming from somewhere deep. “The stranger.”
“Huh?”
It seemed Mandy, in her furious phone call, had only delivered the headline—LOGAN CHEATED—and Sheila had hung up and sprinted over here without waiting for the rest of the story. She was unaware of the collateral damage.
“Last night,” I began, picking at a thread on my comforter. “After I caught them… I claimed a stranger was my sugar daddy. And I kissed him. Right in front of Logan. Just to seem… unaffected.”
Sheila’s eyebrows shot up. “Huh? Whoa.” A slow, impressed grin spread across her face. “That’s… kinda cool, actually. How was it?”
How was it?
The question sent the memory surging back, unbidden. Not the anger or the performance, but the kiss itself. The shocking firmness of his lips, the way his hand had come up to cup the back of my head, not pushing me away but holding me there as he kissed me back. The tingling, pulling sensation that had shot straight through me, a bolt of pure, unexpected electricity that had nothing to do with revenge and everything to do with… him.
I shook my head hard, as if I could physically dislodge the feeling. “No!”
Sheila blinked. “What? Bad kisser?”