Thick as Thieves (Aster Valley 4)

She hesitated. It was clear she was trying to come to terms with it and was having a hard time. I didn’t blame her. “How could you go from marrying me to dating Jules in less than a week?”

“Okay, first, I know you’re upset, but you don’t get to say his name like that,” I warned her. “Julian loves the hell out of you. He punched me when he thought I’d been the one to break up with you on our wedding day.” I pointed to the mostly faded bruise on my jaw. “And I’m pretty sure he’s jealous as fuck right now, but he encouraged me to fly down here and save you because he wanted me to do the right thing.”

Erin toyed with her fingers, eyes on the table, and said in a small voice, “I love him, too. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Yeah, I figured. But to answer your question… when you left me the way you did, hours before the ceremony, at that fancy hotel, with all our guests waiting—”

She groaned quietly, clearly embarrassed.

“—it was a huge shock. Like, not even a surprise, although it was that, too, at first. I mean, it shocked my system like a lightning bolt. It woke me up. I decided that no matter how much I loved you, you and I were really, truly done for good after that, which meant I had to take a long, hard look at my life and what I really wanted from it. The truth is, I was a little sad when I read your note. And I was a little scared. But I was also relieved.” I gave her a half-smile. “Which I’m guessing is probably how you felt when you wrote it.”

“I… I was wrong then, though,” she repeated, like she was trying to make herself believe it.

“You weren’t. We were wrong when we decided to get married. I thought by marrying you, I was getting to have my cake and eat it, too. I’d have Julian as my best friend and you as my wife. But I had it wrong.” I licked my lips and tried to make her understand. “You and I, we’ve always been there for each other during the hard times, but then during the easy times, we’ve gone our separate ways to pursue other things. That’s because you and I are about safety and comfort. About having a soft place to land. But you can’t know how high you’ll go if you keep tying yourself to your safety net. And with Jules, I…”

“You want him during the hard times and the easy times,” she finished for me.

“So much,” I admitted softly. “He’s always been the person I’ve gone to first. I’ve never made a secret about that to you.”

She sighed. “No, I know. And I thought that was great. I loved that you had such a close best friend. And you know I love Jules. But I guess I just thought you had Jules like I had Hazel.”

“Yes, but now I also want to share my life with him.” I didn’t add that I wanted to have lots of sex with him, but I assumed she got the message.

Silent tears escaped her eyes, and I reached out to thumb them away.

“He gives you that romance novel heroine kind of love, huh?” she asked. “The butterfly feeling?”

I smiled softly, thinking of Julian’s face on the pillow beside mine in the night. How just seeing him there made me want to gently stroke his cheek, and bite his lip to mark him, and wake him up to talk to him, and memorize the precise curve of that errant curl, all at the same time.

“Better,” I told her.

Erin pulled herself out of her chair and climbed into my lap, wrapping her arms around my neck and burying her face in my collar. Neither of us spoke, but I felt the transition between us like an odd kind of changing of the guards. Things would never be the same between us again.

I held on to her for a long time before she pulled away and met my eyes. “Do you think Julian would be okay if I was your new Jules?”

No one could ever be like Jules to me, but I knew that wasn’t really what she was asking. “I think he’d expect nothing else.”

She smiled. “He’s a good egg.”

I dipped my chin. “The best.”

She sighed and returned to her chair before reaching across and taking a swig of my cocktail. “Now I need to figure out what I’m going to do with myself, I guess. My parents were already unhappy with the way I treated you, but they’re going to be livid now. And so much for my goal of becoming head buyer for the store. My dad won’t trust me after this.”