“Trix,” he murmured.
“Don’t,” she said. “Just leave it, Jet. Just leave the past where it belongs.”
She grabbed for the door handle, yanked it open, then ran out of the room.
This time it was him watching her go.
Unsurprisingly, this version of the scenario didn’t feel good either.
And it felt even worse when she didn’t come back to the hospital.
Seven
Trix
Oh God, oh God, oh God.
Why had she said that? Why had—
“Fuck,” she muttered, keeping her head down as she hurried to her car. Probably because she was as exhausted as Jet had accused her of being.
It had been a long week, all of the extra shifts she’d been racking up having taken their toll on her body, her mind, and clearly on her fucking out of control emotions. Why had she admitted that Jet had hurt her?
“I mean, not that it’s not obvious.” She sighed, unlocking her car and tossing her stuff inside.
She’d been devastated when Jet had gone.
But, come on, like she’d needed to confirm as much to the man?
Where was all of her the-past-is-the-past bullshit? Or maybe it was exactly that . . . meaning it was all bullshit. Her strength, her ability to be content in her life, to not wish for more or to want her life to have been different so she could be the type of woman a man like Jet might want permanently—
Stop.
She slammed her hand on the steering wheel.
“No. Fuck this,” she muttered. “I am not this person. I am not this weak. I’m fucking not.”
But she wasn’t sure who she was trying to convince.
Herself? Jet? The universe?
Some fucked up combination of all three?
All she truly knew was that she was too tired to ferret out the truth.
It was a special sort of hell to be on a girls’ trip when she’d worked the number of hours she had in the last week.
Just the sheer volume of conversations alone was hell on her brain.
Trix had slept for twelve hours straight before frantically packing a bag and hustling her ass to Heather’s place where a party bus—seriously, a party bus—had picked up her and the rest of the cackling busybodies.
Speaking of, they’d laughed hysterically when Trix had called them that upon first entering said bus and being peppered with questions about the blind date with Jet.
Sera had grinned when she’d pulled herself back together. “Yup.”
Bec had fist-pumped and declared, “That’s right! I’m finally recognized for something other than my law skills.”
Heather had shaken her head though her lips were twitching.
Kelsey had nodded.
And then Rachel had shoved a protein bar into Trix’s hand, Abby had tossed her a blanket, and they’d left her alone to doze for the drive.
So the negative side to the term busybody wasn’t exactly fair, not when their intervening came from caring. But since they seemed to get a kick out of her declaring it, Trix was going to keep it in her back pocket. She’d need some fodder to dish back the teasing this crew gave.
Trix had agreed to go on the trip in the first place because Heather had asked, but also because Heather’s friends were cool and she liked them. She had come home because she wanted to start forming some meaningful relationships, and Heather’s group of girlfriends had been super nice and welcoming.
Of course, they were still nosy as hell.
But now Trix understood that it came from a place of love and wanting their friends happy. Which made it perfectly acceptable in Trix’s book—caring for other people was kind of her specialty.
She’d be happy to call them friends. She wanted to crawl out of her shell enough to be able to count them as friends.
But she felt absolutely raw inside, partly because she was still exhausted from working over twenty-four hours straight and partly because . . . Jet.
What else?
She’d been off-center from the moment she’d turned around in that restaurant last month and seen that six-feet-plus gorgeous male specimen walking toward her. He’d rocked her world, made her long for what she couldn’t have, and he’d left.
Again.
Now he was back. Present in her daily life. At work, with her friends and family. She was trying to adjust to her new life, and Jet was already all over it.
“Yo! Wakie wakie!” Bec bellowed, making Trix jump. “We’re heeere!”
In fairness, Trix had been dozing off over the last two hours, letting the conversation between Heather and her friends—Abby, Seraphina, Rachel, Bec, CeCe, and Kelsey wash over her.
It was comfortable in some ways, to be surrounded by gabbing women. She didn’t know ninety percent of the inside jokes, but she did like the teasing behind it. Light-hearted poking fun, lots of laughter, embarrassing stories about Heather and her inability to hold tequila.
It had been nice to just sit back and listen.
She sat up and stretched her neck from side to side, finding the party bus—good lord—had, in fact, stopped. The other girls were lifting bags and hauling them onto their shoulders. All except Sera, who was arguing with Abby about carrying her bag.
“You’re like a hundred months pregnant,” Abby said, reaching for the bulging duffle.
Sera, a tall, statuesque blonde who easily could be a model, even in her one-hundred-months pregnant state, stepped to the side and blocked Abby.
Abby, Bec, and Sera had been friends well before Heather met Abby when she was interviewing Abby for a job at RoboTech. Abby was married to Heather’s brother and had spent several hundred months pregnant herself while popping out kiddos left and right. Bec didn’t have any kids yet, but based on the conversation on the bus, it wasn’t because her husband or Bec didn’t want them, rather that Bec was just trying to clear some of her caseload so she’d be able to have some work-life balance.
Either way, Trix knew enough to understand that Sera was thrilled to be pregnant and was blissfully happy with her spouse.
She was also about two seconds away from losing her shit because everyone was treating her as though she were glass.
Trix knew this came from a good place, had heard how Sera had been in a car accident early on in the pregnancy and had experienced some bleeding. But by all of Sera and her doctor’s accounts, everything was progressing as it should and she was looking at a normal delivery in about six weeks.
Right in that moment, though, she was in the stabby zone, and so Trix did what she did best.
She intervened.
But smartly.
Slipping past the glaring friends, she bent, grabbed the bag, and walked off the bus.
It took both women some time before they realized what Trix had done, the conversation abruptly cutting off and then footsteps clattering across the floor before Abby and Sera appeared in a huff as they made their way down the stairs.
“Don’t you dare,” Sera growled when Abby made as though to extend her hand to help her descend the final one.
“Fine,” Abby said, hands rising in surrender. “You don’t have to be snarly about it.”
Since Trix was feeling pretty snarly herself about the fuss Abby was putting on, she thought that Sera exercised an impressive amount of self-control when she came to a rest on the ground, extended her arms to the vineyard surrounding them, and declared, “I need wine!”