All Chapters of I Slept With My Best Friend's Son: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

79 Chapters

Chapter Fifty One:The Punch

He stood there for ten seconds. Maybe less. Long enough to watch his mother laugh at something the man beside her said. Long enough to see her hand tighten slightly on Rhett's arm when someone came to shake his hand — the small possessive adjustment of a woman who had been doing this for years and had forgotten, or stopped caring, that it showed. Long enough to think about Nicole. Nicole who had planned this party. Nicole who had made the guest list and called the venue and spoken to the caterer and the florist and the event coordinator. Nicole who had written Ashley's name on the list and paused on it and kept going because she did not yet have the full picture. Nicole who was somewhere in this building right now. He set his glass down on the nearest surface. "Evan." Serena's voice behind him. He was already moving. "Evan —" He crossed the floor. The crowd was thick enough that it took a moment — shoulders, conversations, a waiter with a tray he moved around without stoppin

Chapter Fifty Two:You Knew

The room came apart. Not all at once — in pieces. A woman near the front gasping first, then the ripple of movement as people stepped back from the space around Evan and Rhett, then the crash of a glass someone had been holding and had stopped thinking about, then voices starting up low and urgent the way voices did when something had happened that everyone needed to immediately discuss. Rhett caught himself fully against the table. Straightened. His hand came away from his jaw with a smear of blood across the knuckle from his lip. He looked at it. Then at Evan. Then at the room full of people looking at him. Something moved through his expression. He was a man who understood rooms. Who had spent his entire career understanding them — reading them, working them, making them do what he needed them to do. Right now this room was doing nothing he needed it to do and there were a hundred witnesses to it and the blood on his knuckle was very visible and very real. He did not move towar

Chapter Fifty Three: It Was Always Her

The night air outside hit him like something he had been needing without knowing it. He stood on the pavement outside the venue and breathed. Just breathed. In and out, the cold of it, the realness of it. The sounds of the city going on around him completely indifferent to what had just happened inside that building — traffic, a siren somewhere distant, a group of people laughing outside a restaurant down the block. The world had not stopped. It felt like it should have. He heard the door behind him. Serena. She came out and stopped a few feet away and looked at him with an expression that had moved past stunned and was now somewhere quieter and more careful. She had seen the whole thing — the crossing of the floor, the collar, the punch, his mother's face, all of it. He did not know how to begin explaining any of it and he did not have the capacity to try. She did not ask him to. She just stood there in the green dress in the cold night air and looked at him and waited. He tu

Chapter Fifty Four:The Cake

The ride uptown took fourteen minutes. He sat in the back of the cab and looked at his knuckles. The skin across the first two had broken slightly — not badly, just enough to sting when he flexed his hand. He flexed it anyway. Let it sting. Let it be real. His mother's face. Rhett's blood on his lip. Serena saying *go* with that expression that had too much in it that he did not have the capacity to deal with tonight. The cab stopped at the light on Amsterdam and he looked out the window at nothing in particular and thought about Nicole in that building. Somewhere in the venue she had arranged — the caterer she had called, the florist, the guest list she had built name by name — somewhere in the middle of all that she had assembled for a man who had been walking into parties with her best friend on his arm. She did not know yet. He did not know what he was going to say when he got there. The light changed. --- The apartment was quiet from the outside. One light on in the kit

Chapter Fifty Five:Headlights

She stopped fighting. Not gradually. All at once. Like a person who has been holding something at arm's length for a very long time and has finally run out of the specific strength that holding requires. Her hands, which had been pushing against his arms, went still. Her body, which had been rigid with the effort of pulling away, settled. She leaned into him. Just — leaned. Let her weight go toward instead of away. Her forehead dropped against his shoulder and she exhaled, long and slow and all the way down to the bottom of it, the kind of exhale that had weeks inside it. Weeks of the file and the plan and the guest list and the icing and the sleeve pulled over the wrist and the smile worn over the exhaustion. All of it. Out. He did not say anything. He held her and let the kitchen be quiet around them and let her be tired without having to do anything about it. The cake was on the floor. Neither of them looked at it. --- After a while he pulled back. Just enough. Just fa

Chapter Fifty Six:Ashley Hayes

Neither of them moved. The kitchen held them both in that specific suspended stillness — his hands dropped from her waist, her feet on the floor, both of them facing the window where the light had come from and listening with every part of themselves to what was happening on the other side of the wall. Footsteps. No. Not footsteps. An engine. Still running. Shifting. The light moved again — not stopping, sweeping. The arc of headlights from a car turning, not parking. Going wide across the kitchen wall and then the ceiling and then gone, pulling away down the street in the direction it had come from. The sound of the engine faded. Then nothing. Just the city. Just the ordinary ambient hum of a night going on without incident. Nicole let out a breath. Then another one. Across the street. Her neighbor backing out of her own driveway and disappearing down the road with no awareness that her headlights had just frozen two people solid in a kitchen one floor up. Evan looked at N

Chapter Fifty Seven:Another Way

She heard the car at eleven forty-three. Not the neighbor this time. The specific engine. The specific way it came too fast into the driveway and stopped too hard. The sound of a man who had driven home with something he needed to put somewhere and had not yet decided where. Nicole was in the armchair. Book open. Not reading. Just — placed. A woman in her own living room at the end of an evening, composed, present, doing nothing that required explanation. She heard him at the door. The key going in wrong the first time. Then right. Then the door and his footsteps and the particular weight of them — heavier than usual. The weight of someone carrying more than their body into a room. He appeared in the living room doorway. She looked up. His jaw was swollen on the left side. Not dramatically — he was not a man who allowed dramatic anything, even involuntarily. But the swelling was there, visible and specific, and his lip had been cleaned but had clearly bled earlier and his collar

Chapter Fifty Eight:Rhett's Name In Red

The buzzer went at eight forty-five.Nicole was at the dining table with her coffee and the open folder when it went. She looked at the intercom screen. Looked at it for a long moment. Then pressed the button.She left the door on the latch and went back to the table and closed the folder and moved it to the side and sat with her coffee and waited.Ashley came in looking like a woman who had not slept and had spent the hours she was supposed to be sleeping building toward this conversation instead. Her coat was buttoned wrong. One button off at the bottom, the whole thing sitting slightly crooked. Nicole noticed it and said nothing."I needed to come," Ashley said from the doorway."I know," Nicole said. "Sit down."She sat.---She talked for twenty minutes.Nicole let her.Ashley talked about her marriage — the one before Evan, the one that had ended quietly and badly and left her with a son and a business and the specific loneliness of a woman who had been failed by the person who

Chapter Fifty Nine:Her Name In His Sleep

Serena had the address by Thursday morning.Not through anything complicated — she had simply followed what she knew and kept pulling the thread. Dylan had mentioned uptown. She had the name from the invitation she had held in her hands the night of the party. Rhett and Nicole Anderson. A quick search and the building had come up attached to a professional registration Nicole had filed three years ago through her law firm.She sat with the address for a day.She told herself she was not going to go.Then she got in her car.---Nicole answered the door in work clothes.Blazer, neat, the version of herself she wore when the day required it. She looked at Serena on her doorstep and the recognition moved across her face — she had seen her at the party, briefly, through the chaos of the room."Can I help you?" Nicole said."My name is Serena." She held Nicole's gaze. "I'm a classmate of Evan's."A beat."Come in," Nicole said.---She did not sit.Neither did Nicole, which meant they stoo

Chapter Sixty:Say Her Name

Nicole stood at the closed door for a long time after Serena left.Not thinking exactly. More like — waiting for the thinking to organise itself into something manageable. Something she could pick up and examine and file in the correct place the way she filed everything.It wasn't organising.It was just — there. Sitting in the middle of her chest with Serena's voice attached to it.*He said your name.**Like a habit. Like a word his mouth already knew.*She walked to the kitchen.Stood at the counter.The cake was gone — she had cleaned it up last night after he left, on her hands and knees with a cloth, methodical and quiet. The counter was clean now. Completely clean. No sign of anything.She put her hands flat on the surface.Gratitude, she told herself. That was what this was. A young man who had needed a place to stay during a difficult transition and she had provided it and he had been grateful and gratitude had a warmth to it that could be mistaken for other things if you were

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