Things We Never Said (Hart's Boardwalk 3)

“Ssshh,” I hissed as her singing got a little louder. I closed the bedroom door behind us. “Do you want Mom to hear?”

Dillon shrugged and grinned as she sat down on the bed to take off her heels. “I’m nineteen, and I was out celebrating my big sister’s twenty-first birthday. Not a crime!”

I laughed softly. “Shut up.”

“What’s up with you tonight? You act like you turned forty instead.”

Slumping down on my bed, I stared at my bedroom ceiling and contemplated the disaster that was my birthday party. It had been an overcrowded gathering in one of Gary’s friend’s apartments in Southie, and my boyfriend was already drunk by the time we got there. First, he’d been all publicly handsy, and Michael had to pull him off me when he saw how uncomfortable I was getting. Then Gary had flirted with another girl for most of the night when he wasn’t acting like a dipshit frat boy. I hated when Gary got drunk. He was like a different person.

I’d had a good time though. I’d spent most of the night in a corner with Michael laughing and talking. Dillon had hung out with us too, but there were times it was just the two of us and it had been great. In fact, I’d wanted the whole room to disappear and leave me alone with Michael.

He’d gotten the night off work especially to be there for my birthday.

I felt that low, deep flip in my belly whenever I thought about him. It occurred too whenever I was with him, and he gave me that focused, boyish smile of his.

Guilt swarmed me. Guilt I tried to rid myself of because I was pretty sure Gary, my boyfriend of eight months, was cheating on me.

There were secretive texts and phone calls, and he’d started “working late” at the garage a lot.

“Seriously, Dahlia, what’s up?” Dillon asked. “I’m worried about you. You spent the whole of your birthday with Mike and me instead of Gary.”

I groaned. “You saw how drunk Gary was.” I sat up, needing to talk to someone so badly and since Davina was working crazy hours at some finance company, my little sister had become my closest confidante. “I think he’s cheating on me.”

Dillon wrinkled her cute little nose. “With that trashy girl he was flirting with tonight? No, he was just drunk.”

“No, not her.” Although who knew? “He’s been acting weird lately. Hiding his phone when he gets a text, working later and later at the garage when he’s supposed to be hanging with me.”

“Oh.” Dillon sighed. “You should talk to him about it, then. Eight months is such a long time to be with someone without talking about it.”

I almost laughed at that. Eight months was nothing in the grand scheme of things. “What about the way he was acting tonight? He sat on a guy’s face tonight and farted.”

Dillon gave a bark of laughter. “Okay, I admit, that was nasty.”

“Nasty? Dill, this is a twenty-two-, nearly-three-year-old man we’re talking about.”

“It sounds like you’ve already made up your mind.”

I had.

Turning around I looked at the photos on my wall, my eyes drawn to the one of Michael and me at the diner. Dermot took it a couple of weeks ago. How could no one see what I felt for my boyfriend’s best friend? It was blazing out of my eyes. And if that photo meant anything, if tonight—or any of the times Michael and I had found ourselves alone—meant anything, he felt the same way.

I knew he did.

I was totally and completely in love with my boyfriend’s best friend.

Surely if Gary was cheating, then all bets were off, and Michael wouldn’t feel bad about dating me then, right?

This longing inside of my chest was almost too much to bear. Tears filled my eyes at the thought of never getting to be with Michael, and I was not the crying type.

Oh God, I was so completely and utterly in love with him.

We’d connected from the moment we met in the gallery.

“You’re going to dump him, aren’t you?” Dillon asked.

Biting my lip, I turned back around to face her. “First, I’ll prove he’s cheating and then, yes, I’m going to break up with him.”

“Good. You deserve better than him.”