Page 31

31

HEIDI

“ I think I want to go home,” I tell the girls, immediately feeling overwhelmed in my green morph suit.

“We just got here though!” Mila yells over the thrum of music from the next room.

I shake my head. “I don’t think Emmett wants me here.”

“What do you mean?” Briar asks, looking behind her at where the men are huddled. Cooper looks over, his eyes narrowing, and I nearly miss the middle finger Amara has up.

“I’m just feeling a bit overwhelmed and I really need to get this suit off,” I huff, my heartrate picking up. The room is packed full of bodies and yet I feel like my skin is ice cold.

“Babe are you okay?” Izara steps in, taking me in her arms. She places her hand over my forehead. “You’re burning up.”

“Let’s get her outside,” Isla calls, already making a path for us through the crowd.

Owen catches us as we pass looking concerned. “What’s going on?”

“We just need to go outside, we’ll be back,” Isla assures him.

Instead of going out the main entrance, which would mean making our way through all of the bodies in the next room, we head out the back door I followed Emmett through that night I chased him.

I chased him . Why in the world would I chase a man? And why would I keep chasing him? The man clearly never liked me. Clearly wanted nothing to do with me, and him ghosting me was a message I, for some reason, decided to completely ignore.

Like a damn idiot.

I feel a little better the second we’re through the doors. Hunched over against the wall, I dry heave a couple of times before I can breathe regularly again, and when that happens, I stand up against the brick, feeling the sting of the cold against every inch of my back.

Five women stare back at me.

“What was that?” Mila asks first, looking over me.

I shake my head. “That was embarrassing. We can go back in.”

Isla catches my arm as I turn. “No, you’re not going back in there just yet. Are you okay?”

Sighing, I rub my arms. “I don’t know how he found out that I still have feelings for him but he just made it clear back there that there would never be anything between us,” I say quickly before I can stop myself. “I’m fine. I expected it. It is what it is, I just wasn’t expecting it tonight, that’s all.”

“I thought you guys were starting to be good friends?” Izara asks, her head tilted.

“They were, and then we all told her to go for it,” Amara fills her in, and Zara nods.

I look around at their concerned faces and want to be anywhere but here. Zara’s cat ears are crooked in her locs, and she’s shivering. Isla’s nose is red, and not because of the paint that’s covering her whole outfit—the painting to Owen’s Van Gogh costume. Mila looks like all she wants to do is finally sit down, but she can’t because of the literal stinger sticking out of the ass of her costume. Amara looks like she wants to beat someone up, and I can’t tell if it’s Emmett or whatever issue she has with Cooper that’s keeping her angry.

And Briar just looks sad, which is tragically funny in her sexy ladybug costume. Leo had pulled her close when he first got here, saying “There’s my lady.” One of her antennas are bent, I’m assuming from shuffling through the crowd.

“I promise I’m fine guys.”

“It’s okay if you’re not.”

“But I am.”

The silence settles around us as we all start getting cold.

“Well,” Amara says finally. “I don’t really want to go back in. Why don’t we walk a little and do something else?”

I glance at the door, wanting more than anything to go back in and show the boys how unaffected I am. How happy I can be, despite just being randomly told I have no future with someone I really liked.

Because I was starting to really like him.

A lot.

“What do you have in mind?”

We end up at the inner harbor, just outside of Briar and Isla’s place. Normally, we would be a little nervous out and about at night. But Lulu’s is just down the road. Running distance, and thr—two of us happen to be seeing athletes.

My feet are dangling off the edge, the freezing water beneath us sloshing against the concrete as the nippy wind hits our cheeks.

“I feel like this is the dumbest, most cliché shit I’ve ever said, but men are really overrated,” Amara mumbles, laying back on the concrete.

“I agree,” Briar says, her voice low. I furrow my brows in concern, and when she looks at me, she simply shakes her head.

“The journey to find someone is really weird, isn’t it?” I say, leaning forward just a little.

“It takes time to find good ones,” Zara says with a shrug. “There’s a lot of bad ones out there. A lot of divorces, too. It’s never worth it to settle, believe me. I’ve seen some of the worst in the courtroom.”

My lips pucker as I contemplate this.

Sure, I’m at the tail end of my twenties. My parents were married when they were both twenty-one, and they had me by the time they were twenty-three. I’m doing everything so much later than them, and I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t insecure about it.

Like I didn’t feel like a failure.

“I feel like I’m just getting too old?—”

Amara slaps me on the back. “Babe take those words out of your god damn mouth right now. You’re perfect. You have passions. You still have great tits. Your ass is perky, and even if it isn’t, ass is ass. I know you and you’ve barely tried to date.”

I sigh. She’s right. Emmett is the first man I’ve been interested in in a long time. I’ve barely been on any dates at all.

“I just wish I was good enough. I don’t really have anything to offer, you know?”

“Heidi you have plenty to offer,” Isla says, resting her head on my shoulder.

I shake my head. “You had a whole apartment?—”

“That my brother paid for. That Owen bought from him. I barely paid my own bills, Heidi. I just got lucky.”

Amara wraps her arm around me from my other side, pulling me closer. “You know what we’ve told you about this comparison game in the past, right?”

They’ve told me that nothing as it seems.

And it isn’t.

I know this.

Briar had an abusive ex-husband that literally kept her from having a stable job for years. She’s always had the confidence of one of the most beautiful women in the world, and she even looked the part. But she and Leo had originally entered a fake relationship to repair his image.

She did it because she was left with nothing, and she wanted her daughter to be set up. She didn’t even tell her own brother, Owen, about her struggles.

Isla was living her dream, but it was bought and paid for by Leo.

Izara has been working most of her life away in law school only to start hating it more and more as time goes on.

Amara has had a rough relationship with her family growing up, and often spent time at my house.

And finally, Mila has always looked for assurance in the men around her, and I don’t think she’s really ever found it.

We all have our own issues. Our own stories, and our own paths.

When it comes to me, I lost the most important person in my life, and have grown up looking for validation in everyone, which is particularly hard when you’re in any kind of creative field where you’re compared to literally everyone around you.

I could be so much further in life right now if I had just bucked down.

I should have just been a dentist like my mom suggested in eleventh grade.

I should have done so many different things that would have led to…

Probably the same outcome.

“Do you think he doesn’t want me because of her?” I whisper, and Briar immediately reaches over Isla to place her hand on my thigh.

“There’s no comparison, Hon. There will never be another of her. I’m not sure what’s running through that man’s head, but if it’s wishing that you were her, that’s not a relationship you need to get into anyway.”

I watch her fingers as they comfort me, and when I look up at her, I’m surprised to blink away tears.

“She seemed like a really, really cool person,” I whisper.

Isla shakes her head. “She probably was. But that doesn’t say anything at all about you. You don’t have to be better than her. You just need to be you.”

“I don’t ever expect to be better than her.” I lay back down, kicking my legs up so my toes hang off the edge.

“Good. Because she was a badass and you can be a badass. There’s room for you both in that man’s life if he ever decides to stop being an idiot and let you in.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then he’s an idiot. One day he has to wake up and realize that life is better when you let those who love you in.”

Isla lays down next to me. “You know Owen didn’t even know he had a daughter until like, last year, right?”

I nod. It’s been mentioned numerous times. Isla was flabbergasted.

“The man won’t even adopt a pet. He’s so scared of having someone or something else in his life to care about.”

“It’s hard,” Mila chimes in, standing up. “But I think we all need a little moment to scream.”

“I don’t think we should scream here,” I look around. Screaming in any city in the middle of the night is probably a red flag.

Mila rolls her eyes. “It’s Halloween. We’ve been listening to kids screaming all night.

She’s right.

With a sigh, we all scrabble to our feet, Isla helping me along the way.

We line up, facing the aquarium across the way, and take in the view. When Amara’s fingers wrap around mine, I look down, surprised at the sudden warmth. Instead of saying anything, I grab for Isla’s hand, and I watch as she grabs for Briar’s.

And suddenly, standing there, all together, hands held, I feel free.

Without a word, Mila screams into the inner harbor first, letting go of all her anger and frustration and annoyances. Anything.

The next thing I know we’re all screaming our hearts out, tears pricking at my eyes as my throat starts to scratch in the cold.

And just when we’re done and see red and blue lights heading down the road, we all turn and run back into the building giggling, breathless, and full, our arms around each other.

It’s only now, when Isla looks me in the eyes, wiping my tears away, that I remember my whole face has been green this whole time.

“I hope this comes off,” Isla smiles, looking at her fingers.

“I fucking hope so too.”