Their Joke Ended With One Word: Ex Chapter 03

Their Joke Ended With One Word: Ex Chapter 03

Ian was already halfway through the door before he noticed me standing in the entry with my coat on.

He stopped.

His eyes went from me to the suitcase and back.

“You saw me say in the group chat that I was bringing her back, so now you’re going to make a scene?”

The group chat?

Oh, right. He meant that group chat.

It had taken me two weeks of asking before he let me join.

Nobody had cared when I joined, and nobody had cared when I left it on my way out of that private room.

He frowned and shook his head.

“Is this necessary? You’re a woman too. She’s had too much to drink, and I’m not going to leave her on the street to avoid looking bad.”

“There aren’t any hotels?”

I hadn’t planned on asking.

An ex could take whoever he wanted home and let whoever he wanted stay the night, and it was none of my business.

But it came out anyway.

I’d lived in that apartment for five years.

I’d filled it one piece at a time, and I’d thought I’d live there for good.

It was the whole record of how I’d gone from a guest to the woman of the house.

“A hotel?” He said it in that patient, be-reasonable voice of his. “You’d be comfortable putting somebody that drunk in a hotel?”

“Then I’d have to stay the night with her, and you’d make an even bigger deal out of that.”

He made it sound perfectly reasonable.

Like the whole thing came down to logistics, to where a drunk woman should sleep.

And my objection was oversensitivity, coldness, and pettiness.

But I remembered that she hadn’t been the only woman at that party.

I remembered that plenty of the men were single, including his oldest friend.

And I remembered that Chloe didn’t live on the other side of the world.

I couldn’t out-argue him, so I stopped.

I was about to walk around them when Chloe grabbed my arm, her eyes unfocused.

“Faye, where are you going this late?”

“Are you upset because I’m here? Maybe… maybe I should go.”

She actually reached for the cardigan she’d draped over Ian’s arm.

Her feet slid out from under her, and she tipped straight into him.

Ian caught her elbow without thinking.

“Stand still,” he said quietly.

Then he turned to look at me.

I knew that look better than I knew anything.

It wrapped an apology around a decision he had no intention of changing.

And then it waited for me to say okay.

I believed the apology in his eyes was real.

But I also knew that from the moment he sat down next to her at that party,

Every one of his no-choice decisions had tilted her way.

“Ian.”

He looked at me and waited for the rest.

“You said ‘she won’t mind.’ Did you ask me?”

“What if I told you I do mind?”

The smile stiffened on his face.

“I didn’t think it through.”

Then he walked straight past the question. “Come inside, it’s cold out. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

Tomorrow?

He didn’t know that my tomorrow wasn’t on the same calendar as his anymore.

I let out a breath and took a step forward.

He called after me without thinking.

“Wait…”