Forward, Without Him Chapter 04

Forward, Without Him Chapter 04

Instagram sent a notification. I tapped it. Lexi had posted a Story.
A selfie from a suite at The Plaza.
“Boyfriend booked the room. $2,000 a night. He wants me to put in the effort tonight. What do you think I should do for him? ;)”
I thought back to a night three months before the application deadline.
I was barely holding it together. Called Ethan.
“Can you come home this weekend? Just once? I really need you.”
He said no without missing a beat.
“Taylor, I genuinely can’t afford the train ticket right now.”
“You haven’t been here yet. You don’t know how expensive New York is. There’s always something to spend money on.”
“My coursework is brutal. I can’t carve out the time.”
“Can you try to be a little more mature about this?”
Couldn’t scrape together a forty-dollar train fare. But a two-thousand-dollar hotel suite, no problem.
“Brutal coursework.” Sure. Racing to spend every available minute with my best friend.
I tapped like on her Story. Blank-faced.
She must have seen it. She slid into my DMs almost immediately.
“BFF, jealous? I bet you’ve never stayed in a Plaza suite.”
“When you move to New York, I’ll have my boyfriend book you your own room for a night. Just you, all to yourself~”
Reading her smug little Mean Girl tone, I almost felt sick.
I didn’t reply.
I put my headphones in and pulled up the MIT Physics course catalog.