my plant to carry it in for me so that I could grab my backpack on the front seat, but Kate stopped him before his hand came close.
"Nope, don't touch her plant," she said sternly.
He looked at her as if she had three heads.
"I'll explain it to you later," she smiled.
Kate was a great friend. Anyone else would have laughed or rolled their eyes, but not Kate. She was there for me no matter how ridiculous I was being.
As the three of us worked to unload the boxes into my room at Kate's, my mind kept wandering, and I kept wondering what Tim would be thinking right now after having gotten my text. I knew it didn't do me any good to think about it; I just couldn't seem to stop.
"So, what do you think really happened between him and that woman?" Kate asked as we were grabbing piles of clothes from my backseat since I had run out of boxes while packing.
"I thought you told me it wasn't healthy to keep talking about him," I said.
"True. But I'm changing my mind. I think it's less healthy to keep it all in and silently obsess about it like I know you are. So we might as well talk about it together before you twist things all-around in your mind."
Yep, she knew me.
"I don't know," I said. "I mean, it very well could have been nothing, I suppose. Maybe he just all got swept up in a good time the party he was at and had a bit too much to drink, and then maybe that woman was just trying to come on to him right as somebody snapped a picture of it. It's not like Tim could have stopped her in that exact second if she had just reached her hand onto his lap. He might have pushed it off right after the image was captured, and it could have all been completely an innocent misunderstanding."
"Then remind me why you broke up with the guy?" Kate asked as she paused to look at me.
"He stopped communicating, Kate. He never said anything about it, and then he acted like I barely existed during the days leading up to his trip. If it had been an innocent mistake and if he had cared about me at all, then it would have been important to him to correct the situation and talk to me about it. The fact that he ignored it completely made it seem a lot like an admission of guilt."
"I agree," Nick said as he came back out to get another armful of stuff. "That was a lame thing for a guy to do. No man should treat his woman with such disrespect."
Kate dropped the pile of clothes back onto the seat of the car and turned around to kiss him with a huge smile on her face. She wrapped her fingers in his dark, messy hair and tried to wrap a leg around him too as he leaned her up against the car while they kissed. For a minute, I thought they might start having sex right against the side of my car. They were the most amazing couple, but damn, this was annoying, especially considering my current mood.
"See?" Kate said to him as they thankfully stopped making out and went back to unloading the car. "And this is the kind of shit that makes me love you."
I did still wonder how Tim was going to react when he got back to Seattle and found that he no longer had an assistant at work or at girlfriend. I guessed that he probably wouldn't care. Any handsome billionaire like him could have their pick of women in Seattle. I was sure he wouldn't stay single for long, and I was glad that I had listened to Kate about blocking his number so that I didn't keep obsessing about it. I, on the other hand, would plan to stay single for a while as I tried to shift gears from having a career at a multi-billion dollar company to being a barista at a local coffee shop that made lattes for those business billionaires I used to work alongside. I grabbed another bag and followed Nick and Kate back into the apartment, wondering if this was where I should be at this point in my life.
2
Chapter One (Tim)
“Have a wonderful day, sir.” The flight attendant smiled at me as I disembarked the plane and walked out into the airport.
I turned my