Emery left us then and her color slowly began to return to normal.
“I don’t know why I’m friends with you.”
“It’s because of my bubbly personality, of course.” I reached for the muffin I’d ordered when we arrived at Griffin’s and tore off a piece, popping it into my mouth.
“’Bubbly’ is not the word that comes to mind to describe you.”
“What would you go with then?” I asked, taking another bite of muffin.
She tilted her head, studying me. “Secretive.”
I nearly spit out my muffin at that. “Secretive? You really think that about me?”
“Well,” she tapped a finger against her lips, “yeah. I don’t know much about you.”
“Trust me,” I laughed humorlessly, “there’s not much to tell.”
“And that’s the kind of answer someone who’s secretive gives,” she countered.
I pretended to be unaffected by this conversation. “What do you want to know?” I asked and my heart raced in fear that she’d ask something I really didn’t want to answer. I’d hate to make a scene by running out of there like a crazy person.
“I don’t know,” she leaned back in her chair, holding her cup of coffee. Various gold rings glimmered on her fingers. “Did you go to college?”
“Yeah,” I nodded, trying not to laugh. It seemed like such an odd question to ask someone when I knew she really wanted to know something more personal. Maybe she was building to that.
“What did you study?”
“Business…” Propping my head on my hand, I said in a hushed tone, “What do you really want to know? Something tells me it has nothing to do with what I studied in college. Come on. I don’t bite.”
She shrugged her thin shoulders. “I guess I wondered why out of all the people on the planet you seem to connect so much with Cael. For as long as I’ve lived there, he’s never let someone in like he has with you. True,” she raised her hands in front of herself like a shield, “I don’t know what goes on behind closed doors. So, maybe it’s only sex, but it seems like more than that.”
“It is more,” I whispered. “I don’t know how to explain it to someone else, but what we have it…it’s special.”
She looked at me with pity.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
She sighed. “I don’t want to see you get hurt and the two of you together…that has suffering written all over it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
The pity in her gaze increased. “Do you really think that a relationship with him will last?”
I began to squirm. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t I?” She countered. “I’ve known him a lot longer than you have.”
“You don’t know him like I do.”
She let out a sigh, looking at me like a parent dealing with an unruly child. “Sutton, you’re a smart girl. He might be doing better now, at least it seems that way, but he’s always going to choose the drugs over you. He will never be able to put you first in his life and you deserve so much better than that.”
“I thought you were my friend,” I snapped, my tone cutting.
“I am,” she groaned, “that’s why we’re having this talk. I want you to see that this is going nowhere before you end up hurt.”
I wrapped my hands around the coffee mug, letting the heat penetrate my chilled fingers. “I don’t think you understand our relationship, therefore you can’t know how things will end up.”
“I may not understand, but I’m not stupid. These things always end badly, Sutton. Don’t you think there’s someone else out there that’s a better fit for you?”