scared bitch gone? I wondered, offended and mad all over again. I was nobody’s puppy. I was a German Shepherd, maybe a Belgian Malinois; not the smallest or the biggest but strong, proud and loyal.
Fuck her. Asshole.
“So?” I asked her because it was the first thing that popped into my head. I almost said at least he remembers me, but it didn’t come to me fast enough.
“Jessica,” the man stated, distracting us. “What are you talking about? What did you do?” He paused. “And don’t lie. Don’t even think about.”
And there she was, back to being scared. Or maybe it wasn’t so much scared as… caught. Resigned, and terrified about it, that’s what it was.
And I must have not been the only person to pick up on it because even Zac said, “I remember you now.” And in the blink of an eye, his head lifted, his expression changed into one so serious it was scary, and he asked, “What are you talkin’ about?”
The man said her name all slow and tense.
She gulped again, and a deep feeling of dread filled my stomach. A warning. A premonition.
Tears filled her eyes. Tears I didn’t really believe from how fast they appeared and how effortlessly she batted her eyelashes. “I’m sorry, okay?” she whispered in a tiny voice that made me want to smack her too. Not in the asshole.
And since I didn’t trust these guys to not boo-hoo-woo-woo over her pretty little blue eyes getting teary, I jumped in. “What are you sorry for? What you said to me?”
Nope. Not that. “For what I did,” she answered, still using that tiny voice I wanted to stomp on. “For the phone numbers….”
The phone numbers?
I thought it was Zac who actually said those same words out loud in a question.
Jessica nodded all timidly and at the floor again.
What phone numbers?
It was the man who asked with a bewildered face, “What phone numbers? What did you do? Tell the truth.”
The fact he kept asking what she had done wouldn’t settle in my brain for hours. What kind of person were you? I would wonder later, that someone would assume you had done something. But I wouldn’t worry about that for hours. Until later. Until after all this had come to the surface.
She started to cry, just a tear, then two, and she sniffed. “The phone numbers.”
What the hell was she talking about?
“I… I’m sorry. I was j-j-jealous, Enzo. Do you understand? I was jealous, and I… I was a lot younger, and I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry I did it.” She broke off, sniffling and sniffling and sniffling.
Fake, fake, fake. Did people really fall for this act? I glanced at my old friend to check his reaction and froze at his expression.
“What did you do?” Zac asked in the calmest, flattest voice I’d ever heard from him. His shoulders were down, and that sparkle in his eye, which was about as steady as the sun, was gone. Even all the lines on his face were smooth. Two stripes of pink flagged his cheeks, and I knew it wasn’t a blush. It was anger.
Zac was angry.
She moved her gaze toward him, tearing up, and murmured, “About swapping your numbers….”
What?
Zac looked at me. “Darlin’, do you know what she’s talkin’ about?”
I had no idea and I said so.
The woman started weeping, and I could see a couple faces turn at the sound. The tears sounded so goddamn fake, I couldn’t believe it. My niece had been better at fake crying than that by the time she was one. I’d seen Connie make herself cry a hundred times, and she could have won an Academy Award for her acting job.
Jessica had experience, I could tell, but she didn’t have the same talent as my sister or my niece at doing it. Plus, I didn’t like her, so I didn’t get a kick out of it.
My stomach tensed.
“What numbers did you swap?” the Enzo guy asked, carefully, slowly too.
She sniffed again, and I barely heard her answer. “Theirs….”
What the hell was she talking about?
One of them must have asked because she answered. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. I just forgot, and I thought that they would eventually notice and it wouldn’t be a big deal, and I didn’t know, okay? I didn’t mean to—”
“Jessica.” The man named Enzo took a step back before he asked, “What did you do exactly? Don’t. Lie.”
She put her hands to her face as her shoulders hunched, and I was pretty sure we