If We Were Perfect - Ana Huang Page 0,3

summer. Thanks to Farrah, he knew she was working on her MBA at Stanford—Olivia had almost killed her for letting that piece of info slip, to which Farrah merely responded, “Why? Are you afraid he’ll show up on campus and you’ll have hot, sweaty makeup sex?”

Ha! As if. Eight years was a little too late for makeup sex.

As for Sammy’s displeasure, too bad. He didn’t own the city. She could move here if she wanted (she didn’t, but she could).

“Olivia? Is that you?”

Olivia stiffened when a familiar blonde sidled up next to Sammy. Golden hair that fell past her shoulders in shiny waves, red lipstick that matched her Ted Baker sheath dress perfectly, a face that would make a supermodel weep.

Jessica.

“It is you!” Sammy’s girlfriend grinned. “Sam didn’t tell me you were in San Francisco.”

She called him Sam? No one called him Sam.

But Sammy didn’t so much as blink an eye at the moniker.

“I’m here for the summer.” Olivia forced a smile and repeated her explanation. “I just finished my first year of business school at Stanford, and I’m working at my company’s SF branch until classes start again.”

“I didn’t know she was in the city until we ran into each other here.” Sammy slid an arm around Jessica’s waist, and Olivia fought the urge to upchuck. She’d only met Jessica twice before—once at Sammy’s Fourth of July barbecue in New York three summers ago, and once at Farrah and Blake’s wedding. Funnily enough, she’d wanted to upchuck both those times, too. “She was just leaving. She has to go before her date comes back.” A tiny smirk tugged at the corners of his mouth.

Olivia glared at him; he stared back with one infuriatingly arched brow.

Jessica, to her credit, didn’t press on why Olivia was leaving her date high and dry. Instead, her smile widened. “We should all have dinner sometime. There’s a bunch of great restaurants in the city I’m sure you’ll love.”

Ugh. Why did she have to be so nice? It would be easier to hate her if she were a total witch. Not that Olivia had a reason to hate her ex’s current girlfriend or anything. She didn’t even like Sammy anymore.

“I’m sure Olivia’s busy.” Sammy’s voice contained a note of warning.

“Too busy for dinner?” Jessica shot her boyfriend a look Olivia couldn’t decipher.

“Thanks for the invite. And yeah, let’s grab dinner sometime.” Olivia would rather roll around in a puddle of sewer water than eat dinner with Jessica and Sammy, but this was the twenty-first century. People made vague plans with no follow-up all the time. “Listen, I have to go. There’s an emergency at my apartment.”

She needed to get out of here. Wesley was going to be back any minute, Sammy was sucking all the oxygen out of the room, and Jessica...well, Jessica was making her stomach churn.

Not because the blonde was mean or had said anything wrong, but because she was there. With him. Olivia hated seeing them together, and she hated herself for hating it.

Jessica’s brows dipped. “Everything okay?”

“Yes. I just have to go check on...stuff.”

“You have Sam’s number, right? If you need help, give him a call and we’ll be there.”

“Thanks.” It was weird that a woman she barely knew was acting like they were best friends and even weirder that said woman seemed intent on throwing her boyfriend back with his ex, but that wasn’t Olivia’s problem.

Sammy remained silent, his expression unreadable.

Olivia mumbled a goodbye, paid for her dinner against her earlier plans—she didn’t trust Wesley to cover their tab or tip appropriately—and hailed a cab home.

While the taxi wound its way through San Francisco’s hilly streets, she tipped her head back and closed her eyes, exhaustion sinking into her bones.

God, what a night. First her ridiculous date, then running into Sammy and Jessica.

She hadn’t reached out to Sammy when she moved to California last year, even though he’d been the only person she knew in the area. Stanford was a forty-five-minute drive from San Francisco, and she’d been swamped with schoolwork. Plus, while they were no longer on hostile terms, they weren’t exactly friendly, either.

“Get it together, Olivia,” she muttered under breath.

Dwelling on the past was a waste of time, and if there was one thing Olivia hated, it was wasting time. The average life expectancy for a female in the U.S. born in Olivia’s birth year was seventy-nine years. That was 28,835 days, 41,522,400 minutes. She had an ever-present clock in her mind, ticking down those days and minutes