Authors: LD Davis
Rohanna narrowed her eyes. “You really didn’t know?”
“I wouldn’t be here had I known,” I said scathingly. “But thanks for opening your big, bitchy mouth.”
I grabbed my purse and hurried out of the room. I needed to get the fuck off the boat and get the hell out of Miami, but I couldn’t even think straight. I couldn’t even remember how to get off of the piece of floating shit. My eyes were blurring, but I refused to cry. I refused to cry in front of these people that I didn’t know, but Leslie knew. Leslie, because Leslie had been here, in Miami, with Leo. Living a life with him. Engaged.
Engaged!
And pregnant! And I had known nothing. He had told me nothing. She had told me nothing. Fuck’s sake, Sandy had told me nothing!
“Tabitha, wait!” Christina caught up to me as I descended a set of stairs I thought lead to the second level where I could get off of the boat.
“I need to get out of here,” I said, my voice cracking and breaking.
“Look, it doesn’t matter,” she said, following me. “It doesn’t matter about Leslie. Rohanna is a bitch and shouldn’t have said anything. She and Leslie were close, but you should let Leo explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain!” I yelled, spinning on her. “He lied to me! Everyone except for Rohanna lied to me. I should give her a fucking medal.”
“No one lied,” she said softly. “It’s just that…no one said anything.”
“It’s the same as lying,” I pointed out. Then bitterly, I said, “But if that’s what makes you feel better, word it however the hell you want to.”
I turned away from her and hurried down the gangplank to solid ground.
“Can I help you, Miss?” A man in a crisp white uniform asked me.
“I need a cab,” I said. “Immediately.”
Using a little radio, he called to someone and asked for a cab. I hurried to the parking lot of the marina to wait for it, knowing I was on limited time. It wouldn’t take long for Leo to figure out what had happened and come looking for me.
I ignored Leslie’s message. I just couldn’t look at it. I had no doubt in my mind that she texted me because Rohanna had been talking to her via text when I sat down at the table. It angered me that she probably had a full conversation with Ro but didn’t take a few minutes to answer my text until she found out about me and Leo.
I was humiliated. Everyone, all of Leo’s friends at that wedding knew about Leslie. I was left to look like the betraying bitch, the woman who stole her best friend’s man. No wonder Leo had told me to wait, not to leave, made me promise. He knew that’s how I would perceive it. He knew that had I known about Leslie from the beginning, I would have gone back to my hotel the night of the party and flew out of Florida and out of his life again the following day. I stayed under false pretenses, and that was unforgivable.
The cab arrived faster than I expected. Just as I was climbing in, I heard the reception begin as the DJ announced the first bridesmaid and groomsman. It wouldn’t be long before Leo realized I wasn’t there if he didn’t know already. Christina probably told him.
I told the cab driver where I needed to go and offered him a fifty dollar tip if he could get me there in record time without killing us or getting pulled over. He got us there so quickly that I gave him seventy-five on top of the base cab fare. Using my spare house key, I hurried inside of Leo’s house. I took my shoes off so that I could move faster without falling on my face. I was pissed off that all of my things were unpacked; I’d have to leave most of it. All but my computer, my external hard drive, and other writing paraphernalia were replaceable.
As I shoved those items and a few others into my laptop bag and a duffel bag, my eyes fell across the unmade bed. The sheets were rumpled and the soft scent of our mixed scents and the scent of sex made my body react with heat, but my heart broke into a thousand pieces. I swallowed back my tears, zipped up my bags, and walked away.
I was stowing my bags into my rental car when Leo started calling me. Katy Perry’s voice cut through the early evening with an acoustic version of “Teenage Dream.” I had set the ring tone in the middle of the night during our food run at Disney, the night I had let myself go.
I didn’t want to answer the phone and talk to Leo, but I had to know what kind of head start I had on him. I had ignored the first three calls, but I answered on the fourth as I navigated through the weekend Miami traffic not far from his house.
“What?” I snapped into the phone.
“You
promised
!” Leo shouted. “You fucking promised me you wouldn’t run! I’m ten minutes from home; don’t go anywhere, Tabitha. I swear to god—”
I hung up the phone. I had a decision to make. I could go to the airport, in which case I wouldn’t put it past Leo to search me out there, buying airline tickets to get through security to find me, or to take the first flight back to Philadelphia and intercept me there. I had no choice. I had to drive back. It would be a long trip, but maybe I’d stop a few times along the way and take the time I needed to pull my head together. Maybe after he realized I wasn’t at my place in New Jersey after a few days, he’d fly back home.
My phone rang again. Part of me wanted to go back and hear his explanation, but I knew there was no excuse for what Leo had done, for what he had failed to tell me. I was done. I was so fucking done.
“Girl Code Is Real. Don’t break it... BUT, some things to consider:
- Are we really best, best friends? Or have we grown apart and our friendship is nothing more than memories?
- Is my best friend a bitch (and by bitch I mean, a conniving, calculating, mean cunt) and I failed to realize it until now?”
Marta V., New York, United States
I was about halfway home, halfway to New Jersey, driving through South Carolina when it hit me. It really hit me, hard, like driving eighty into a brick wall.
I had never wanted anything as much as I wanted Leo Pesciano. Never in my life. Even when I was a teenage girl and he was dating my best friend, I wanted him. I never admitted it out loud, or even to myself, but I wanted him. It wasn’t just a want. It was a need, like every part of me needed him in a way that I couldn’t have him. I needed his smiles just for myself, his laughter, his words, his embrace, his kisses, and his love and affection. A hole as deep and dark as space had been left in me during our nine-year absence. Every day that I was with him in Florida, he filled it a little more until he was consuming me, until I was wrapped in him entirely, and completely whole.
But he was never mine, never could be mine. Even for those couple of brief days when I thought he was mine and I was his, he wasn’t mine. He would always be hers as far as I was concerned. Any other woman could walk into Leo’s life and claim him and that would be fine, but not me. It didn’t work that way for me, because he belonged to Leslie, and long ago, I had promised her that I would never take him, and in a way, I had kept my promise. I didn’t take him. I never really had him. I could never really have him, the one person that I ever really wanted.
My broken heart was my own fault. The pain roaring through my blood and touching every part of my body was my own doing. I did something I was never supposed to do, and I foolishly believed that I could have something I was never meant to have. But I also hurt because Leo didn’t tell me the truth. He hid the truth about Leslie from me, and I hurt because Leslie, who was supposed to be such a good friend, didn’t even tell me she was back with Leo, didn’t tell me about the baby they apparently lost. It was like I meant nothing to her anymore, and that wasn’t fair. I had sacrificed the biggest thing in my life for her and she couldn’t even give me a phone call.
I stayed cooped up in a hotel in South Carolina for days, absorbed in my misery, until I couldn’t stay any longer. I had my assistant, Suzanna, gather everything I needed for New York, and there were only a few days’ grace period between that and Pittsburgh. I needed to pull myself together because I had commitments to tend to.
I half expected Leo to show up in New York during the signing, but he didn’t. For most of that day, I didn’t even get one of his myriad of phone calls. It was like he knew to leave me alone during those hours, and maybe he did. I had gone over my schedule with him in great detail, and it was all on my website and Facebook page to see anyway.
I never responded to Leslie’s text. I did eventually look at it, but I didn’t answer it.
How is Miami?
was all she said. I had no doubt that she knew how Miami was. She had most likely spoken to Rohanna and probably even Leo by then. Maybe I had no right to be angry with her. I was the one that broke the pact, but she abandoned me as a friend, dropped me like I wasn’t good enough. It’s no excuse for what I had done, but Leslie earned my anger just the same.
And Sandy. I loved Sandy, but she had let me down, too. She had known about Leslie, though she claimed she didn’t know how serious it was. She only knew that Leslie had been in Miami. It didn’t matter if she thought it was serious, or if she thought they were just fucking, or just friends, or whatever. Knowing my aversion to a relationship with Leo and why, she should have said something long ago.
I wasn’t in the mood to talk to any one of them, even after I’d had some time to cool off. I wanted to go check on my parents and brother, because other than a few text messages between my dad and me, I hadn’t spoken to my family in weeks, and I wanted to pull myself together for all of the traveling I had ahead. I had less than two weeks before I had to be in San Francisco and after a stop in Long Beach, I only had a few days between there and Chicago.
When I unlocked my apartment door for the first time in weeks, I was flabbergasted to find Leo there, waiting for me with his arms crossed and his jaw ticking. I only needed one guess to know how he got inside, his co-conspirator, Sandy.
“What are you doing here?” I asked stupidly. Of course, I knew why he was there, but I couldn’t help asking the dumb question.
“I called you every day for fourteen and a half days,” Leo launched into what was sure to be an epic fight. “I called you
several
times a day and sent you countless text messages and you didn’t answer me, not even once. Not one fucking time.”
I dropped my bags on the floor near the door and pushed my sunglasses up into my hair. I put a hand on my hip and one weary hand to my forehead. His tightly wound stance loosened some. His brow came down as he looked at me with a mixture of anger and concern. I knew I looked like shit. I had spent days crying and had hardly eaten anything since I left Miami, hardly slept. I knew there were dark bags under my swollen eyes, and that my skin was pale, and I knew I had lost a few pounds, too. The jeans I purchased in Orlando during my escape from Florida were loose around my waist.
“You don’t look too good,” Leo said, running a hand through his hair.
“You either,” I said, my voice hoarse and sad.
He looked like he hadn’t been sleeping, either, and he had several days’ worth of hair on his face.
“I can’t sleep at night,” he confessed, his voice stressed and cracking as he stepped toward me. “I can’t sleep during the day, either. I can’t do shit, except to pace a hole in the floor worrying about and thinking about you. Why did you leave like that, Tabitha? Fuck,” he said, pushing a hand through his already disheveled hair. “Why didn’t you at least let me know you were okay? You could have answered just once and told me to fuck off and leave you alone.”
“Would you have stopped calling?” I asked coldly.
“No, but at least I would have known you weren’t fucking dead on the side of the road somewhere!” He shouted so loudly that I took an involuntary step backward. “Did you think about that? For four days, I thought something terrible had happened to you! Sandy finally told me you answered her once, just once, but at least we knew you were still breathing.”
“I needed to be alone,” I said defensively.
“I can understand that, I can really understand that,” Leo said quickly, anger still lacing his words. “But you don’t just disappear off of the face of Earth! Not to mention that you promised you wouldn’t do that shit, but there are people who actually give a fuck about you!”
“People who give a fuck about me don’t lie to me!” I shouted back at him. The effort it took to yell made me dizzy, but I didn’t want to appear any weaker than I already did in front of Leo. I fought off the dizziness and just barely kept myself from swaying.
“I didn’t lie to you!”
“You omitted a very vital truth, it’s the same thing!”
“If I would have told you the truth, would you have stayed? Would you have given us a chance?” he asked accusingly.
“That’s not the point!” I yelled.
“That
is
the point, Tabitha! You wouldn’t have stayed with me if you knew. You wouldn’t have let yourself love me if you knew. I didn’t want what I have with you ruined because of something I
don’t
have with Leslie.”
“What
do
you have with Leslie exactly?” I asked, crossing my arms across my chest.
“Finally ready to hear the details, are you?” he asked sarcastically.