Teacher's Pet

"I wish you'd tell me what I did so I could apologize," she said.

"If I did, would you shut up and leave already?" I snapped. She glared at me and stormed out of the room, closing the door loudly behind her. "Fuck," I said going back into the bedroom. I got to the bed and fell onto it backward. "Fuck!"

It was the right thing. It was wrong leading her on. Just breaking it off was the right thing to do. I had done the right thing. It was hard now, but it would get better. It fucking had to. Kirsten had called me a bad person for leading Abby on. Why didn’t I feel better now that she was gone?

Chapter Twenty

Abby

If I just kept my eyes closed, I could go back to sleep. I didn't know what time it was, but it was morning, and it was early. I knew that for sure because my body was wide awake, and I had been trying to get back to sleep for the past half hour. I had tried sleeping on both my sides and my stomach, keeping my eyes closed, but it hadn't worked yet.

I wasn't tired, I knew that, but how did other people do it? Just stay in bed even though it was time to get up? I didn't want to get up. I was trying to mope.

The last time I had seen Nate was Friday, and I had spent all of Saturday doing my best not to run into him by accident. I'd made the mistake of finally getting him to come out of his hotel room, and now I got to pay for it because I didn't want to see him.

Come on, Abby; there's no way he's in bed right now rehearsing what he's going to do on the off chance that he sees you today, I tried to convince myself. Of course, he wasn't. He wasn't the one who had been left hanging. He wasn't the one who had begun to think that this had been deeper than it had really been.

I had done it to myself. I had nobody to try to peg the blame on but myself. I'd told myself things that he had never said or promised me. I had let myself believe promises he had never made.

This was why I didn't do this. It was risky, and it was stupid. There was no way to win. There was no way to save yourself from feeling like this. It would always happen: whether it was small or big, you always got hurt.

I rolled onto my stomach. Face down. At least I wasn't crying anymore.

I heard a knock at the door. Squeezing my eyes shut tighter, I ignored it. It came again, louder that time. I knew who it was, and part of me was dreading seeing her. I dragged myself out of bed and went to let Makani in.

"Hey," she said, carefully stepping inside.

"We haven't had a date in so long. I at least expected breakfast," I joked half-heartedly. She gave me a smile and didn't push it. I walked directly back to my bed and burrowed under the blanket. I heard her walking around for a bit before her footsteps approached.

"Scoot over," she said, climbing onto the bed. I uncovered my head, seeing her sitting on it with two steaming cups of coffee. "I know it's bad if I'm out of bed before you are," she said. I took the coffee and sat up against the headboard, scooting down so she could sit next to me.

"You sleep in all the time, I don't know why it’s a bad thing when I do it," I said, sipping the coffee.

"Because you haven't missed a sunrise in your life. Can you tell me what happened?" she asked. I took a couple long sips of my coffee.

"You were right," I said, looking down into the creamy liquid instead of at her.

"Right about what?"

"I let myself get carried away. I shouldn't have expected anything of him."

"Did he say something? What happened?"

"He took me out to dinner," I started. She nodded, remembering. Yet another day I had bailed on her to go pretend with Nate. "We spent the entire day together. He bought me a dress and had booked this amazing place for us to have dinner that night."

"He took you on a date," she said.

"He said it was to show his gratitude for me taking him around the island, and I should have believed him," I sighed.

"We're there, and it's gorgeous, but he gets this phone call. Someone keeps calling him, and he keeps turning it off because he doesn't want to take it. I told him he could because it might be important if the person was trying that hard to get in contact with him.

“He leaves, and when he comes back, and it's like someone poured cold water over him. He was so distant and distracted the whole dinner. We got back to his suite, and he says he thinks it would be better if I went back to work."

"He asked you to leave?"

"He didn't ask me anything. He told me he wanted me to leave. He basically said he didn't want me there anymore. It would have been one thing if he just didn't think I should sleep in his suite, but he wanted me gone. I thought..."

I paused because it was the first time I was admitting it to myself out loud. "I thought that maybe there was somet