And tonight, he was telling Whitney.
***
“Girlfriend, what you’re saying is pure ridiculousness with a little hint of silly.”
Whitney laughed at Chloe’s words, both women seated comfortably at a small corner table at a nearby Starbucks. “What part?”
“All of it. Andrew is crazy about you. Even since you were fifteen all he did was watch you and try to talk to you. He never even dated women his age, Whitney. And that’s not because he isn’t gorgeous. Don’t you remember? How he just . . . waited for you? That was the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen. He was older and could’ve gotten an easy girlfriend to take care of his urges instead of a young one like you who wouldn’t do shit for him.”
With a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, Whitney stared down at her small salad and picked on the lettuce without much of an appetite.
“Danny said he only came to the parties to look at you,” Chloe added. “And I know for a fact that last night, he did not take his eyes off of you for a second. Those eyes look at you like it hurts, Whit. Like it genuinely hurts him to look at you.”
Whitney scowled and tried to settle her nerves, but Chloe’s words weren’t helping with the decision she’d made this morning. Now she just sat there, feeling less than optimal, as she tried to digest Chloe’s words since she would clearly not be digesting her lettuce. “Do you remember when my Uncle Harry . . . how I, uh, I kept quiet for years about what he did to me?” Whitney asked tentatively.
Chloe gentled her expression and lowered her chicken panini back to her plate without munching. “Yes, Whit.”
“I’m not that girl anymore. I’m not going to stand by and let anyone hurt me anymore.”
“I’m not saying that you should. It just strikes me as odd that you say he’s lying to you. Last night, Whitney, he almost looked . . . haunted when he saw you flirting with all those men. That man loves you.”
Whitney sighed and dropped all semblance of pretending to eat, her fork clattering down on the table. “All right, so what would you do if Graves left for three years? Wrote you a letter every couple of months, and then didn’t write for a year, Chlo.”
“Graves wouldn’t do that,” Chloe said brightly.
“That’s what I thought of Andrew,” Whitney returned with a meaningful lift of her brows. “Now would you expect Graves to come back without even explaining why the hell he left for so long?”
Chloe’s mouth pursed thinly, and lightly she drummed her fingers on the table. “Honestly even talking about it makes me queasy, because—”
“Because you love Graves and he loves you. You don’t think you could possibly be without him for so long.”
“Okay, so I see your point.” She lifted both her hands up in a placating gesture, then dropped them with a dreary sigh. “So what are you going to do?”
“If I can even hope to have something meaningful with him in the future, I think we need a redo.” Lifting the sleeves of her silk button-down shirt, Whitney revealed one of her tattoos over the table, and her stomach lurched nervously once more. “I really think I need to have this removed.”
Sheer horror widened Chloe’s eyes. “Whitney!” she cried, curling her hand around the tattoo as though protecting it from Whitney’s thoughts. “That’s like a divorce to you. You took that so seriously. You kiss it and stroke it like it’s actually Andrew.”
“Obviously he didn’t take it as seriously as I did.”
Frowning at that, she covered the tattoo back up and dropped her arm. The thought of not wearing his name on her skin tomorrow made her stomach churn, but honestly, deep down, she’d known it months ago, when Andrew had stopped sending letters, that she would have to have it removed. It was the only way she could think of to put their relationship back into perspective and allow for a fresh new start.
And yet knowing what had to be done didn’t make it any easier.
Half an hour later, she stared at the tattoo parlor sign and wanted to vomit up the food she hadn’t even eaten. Fralo’s Tattoo Parlor was the same small corner place they’d visited three years before, when Whitney was barely turning twenty, young and in love, ready to promise Andrew the world. He’d been older, wiser, and he’d been her everything.
They’d shared two wonderful years together.
But now, they had been apart even longer.
Her throat was on fire when she walked up to the man behind the counter and showed him her wrists. “Can you take these off?”
The embodiment of ink with a “beard” tattoo failed to remember her.
He didn’t seem to be acting as though what she asked was something monumental. He merely studied the design, nodded as though very pleased with his work, and said, “Tattoos are permanent, everyone knows that, but I can hide it with a color close to your skin tone.”
She asked the price, then nodded at the number he gave her, and hated that she wanted to cry. “So can you do it now?”
Within minutes, she was sitting in that same chair, the one that had made her feel flutters of excitement while sitting there before, as the man got everything prepared. Soon the machine began to buzz on her right wrist. The pricks didn’t feel good this time. They didn’t feel like it was Andrew, branding himself to her.