Ugh.
She kept going.
“So this time, bitch, listen up. You’re amazing. You’re sweet and kind and together. Your sister and mother might be classic English rose beauties, but you’re a hundred times more attractive than they are, and not only because you have a fantastic personality, or any personality at all. You’re just really freaking pretty. Also, there’s nothing wrong with being an introvert, but you’ve got no reason to be shy. People like you. You’re interesting. And in a world where everyone thinks their opinion on any little thing is important, someone being quiet and listening more than they jabber is a cool change.”
I said nothing, and not only because I was listening.
Gal took that as her cue to carry on.
“So I’m going to tell you that if I see all this, Rix Hendrix is gonna see it. And obviously, he sees it. The man has been fucking everything that moves for a while now, and he wants to be a couple with you. Okay, it’s a couple with limits, but he got nowhere near that with anyone else, so that’s pretty freaking huge.”
This was something to consider, all of it (and we could just say, since Sunday, I’d been considering it…frequently).
Because Rix had been a total manwhore.
I wasn’t even very close to him before all this went down between us, and he was such a manwhore, I couldn’t escape it.
It didn’t feel good back then, but it wasn’t my place for it to feel bad.
Now, if I understood what was happening, he was offering to give that up and just be mine (if only for a time).
Which, yes, was huge.
“And you’ve been in town for a few years, Alex,” Gal continued. “But I grew up here. She was older than me, but I knew Peri Poulson in school. Everyone knew her. She’s pretty. She’s bubbly. She’s tall and looks like a Sports Illustrated model, and she knows it. But when the whispers started that she broke up with her fiancé, the firefighter who got critically injured in the Cellar Fire, not a one of us who knew her was surprised about that.”
This was news.
“Really?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” she answered. “And I’ll add that even all the guys she constantly had eating out of her hand thought that was low, because it super freaking was. She lost respect. She lost friends. And she deserved to lose both.”
She one hundred percent did.
“You didn’t share any of this last night,” I noted.
“Well I’m sharing it now because you fill your life, but babe, seriously, you take zero risks. You’re one of the coolest chicks I know with the way you go get it. But then again, there are some things, important ones, where you don’t. Now, think about what’s happening with you and this guy, because he had happen to him what happened to him, then finds out his fiancée is a puddle, not a lake. She’s about appearances. He no longer worked in the River Rain advertising spread vision of what she wanted her life to look like. He’d fuck her Insta, and I follow her. She’s all about her IG, showing the world how perfect her life is up in the Arizona Mountains. But it’s for certain they haven’t invented a filter to disguise prosthetics.”
I felt my heart squeeze.
“Holy wow, she’s that shallow?” I asked.
“I know her, but I don’t know her very well. Maybe she has some substance to her,” Gal allowed. “Rix went through a ton of woman like they were water, but he’s stuck into you. Which suggests he has a type, and some superficial bitch is not it. So I can’t for the life of me think there was nothing to her. But when you know who she is, and you see her around town, you’ll get me. Her water bottles match her outfits, that’s all I’m saying.”
She need say no more.
I so got it.
To express that, I said, “Okay.”
“My point is, this guy is coming off that blow, which was by far not the only one he was sustaining at the time it landed. I get his twice bitten in the ass by life, a hundred times shy. But he’s down to be with you. And he’s honest with you about where he’s at. My opinion, that right there is enough to give this a go, have fun while you can, and end shit when it starts to feel like it’s gonna get messy.”
She’d lost me.
“That right there? I don’t—”
“He’s not promising you anything to the point he’s promised you, in the end, there won’t be anything but the friendship you guys will go back to,” she explained. “That’s big. Guys go in knowing that’s where they’re at, but they sure as shit don’t share that little nugget with you.”
All right.
From that comment, now I was wondering how open Gal was about things in her life.