Nobody's Girl

SLOANE I have never believed that loving one person means you have to stop loving everyone else. People usually hate that sentence. They hear it and immediately begin constructing a version of me they can comfortably dislike. Selfish. Greedy. Emotionally unavailable. A woman who wants to have her cake and eat it too. I have been called worse. The truth is, I don't think love is a cake. I don't even like cake. I think it is more like a house with too many rooms. Some people stay in the kitchen. Some sleep in your bedroom. Some have a key to the front door and somehow still manage to surprise you when they walk in. And then there are people you only let into the garden. You love them. You just don't give them the whole house. I didn't think there was anything wrong with that. At least, I didn't then. “Are you listening to me?” I looked up from my phone. Adrian was staring at me from across the table. He had that particular expression he wore when he suspected I was somewhere else entirely, even though my body was sitting directly in front of him. “I am.” “You've been staring at your phone for five minutes.” “Four.” His eyebrow lifted. “Four minutes and thirty-seven seconds.” “That's worse.” I smiled. He didn't. Adrian had never been particularly good at pretending not to know me. That was one of the things I loved about him. He noticed everything. The tiny pause before I answered a question I didn't want to answer. The way I twisted my ring when I was nervous. The fact that I hated being called beautiful when I was wearing no makeup because, according to him, it made me suspicious of the compliment. He knew the difference between my real laugh and the one I used when I wanted somebody to stop talking. He knew I hated tomatoes. He knew I couldn't sleep properly when it rained. He knew that when I said I'm fine, I could mean anything from I'm genuinely fine to If you ask me one more question, I might cry. Adrian knew me. And knowing someone is a dangerous kind of intimacy. “Who is it?” he asked. I placed my phone face-down on the table. “No one.” He laughed once. Not because anything was funny. “You're terrible at lying, Sloane.” “That's actually quite offensive.” “You're terrible at lying to me.” That was different. I looked at him for a moment. There were some people you could lie to without feeling the weight of it. Adrian wasn't one of them. Maybe that was why I loved him. Maybe that was why I kept coming back. My phone vibrated against the table. Adrian's eyes flicked toward it. I didn't move. Neither did he. For a few seconds, we sat there in the strange silence that only exists between two people who have been together long enough to understand what the other person isn't saying. Then I reached for my glass. “Drink your wine.” “I'm not thirsty.” “That's unfortunate.” His mouth twitched. There. That was better. I smiled into my glass. My phone vibrated again. And again. Adrian shook his head. “Someone really wants your attention.” I glanced at the phone. The screen was still facing down. I didn't need to see the name. I already knew who it was. Roman. I turned the phone over beneath the table and typed quickly. I'm with Adrian. Three dots appeared almost immediately. Then disappeared. Then returned. And? I stared at the message. That was Roman. Always pushing. Always asking questions he already knew I wouldn't answer. And nothing, I typed. His response came before I could put my phone away. You're a terrible liar too. I locked the screen. “Everything okay?” Adrian asked. I looked at him. His dark eyes were fixed on mine. For one dangerous second, I wondered what would happen if I told him everything. Not just about Roman. Everything. The whole complicated, embarrassing, beautiful mess of it. I wondered whether he'd still look at me like that. Like I was home. Then I smiled. “Everything is perfect.” Adrian reached across the table and took my hand. His thumb brushed slowly over my knuckles. And because I loved him, because I genuinely loved him, something inside my chest tightened. That was the part nobody understood. It wasn't that I didn't love enough. It was that I had never believed love was supposed to make everything else disappear. Adrian was my calm. Roman was my chaos. And somewhere between the two of them, there was another man whose name Adrian didn't know. Elias. I hadn't planned for Elias. That was the problem. Roman had been deliberate. Adrian had been inevitable. But Elias had simply walked into my life one Tuesday afternoon and looked at me like he could see every carefully locked room inside my head. I should have walked away. Instead, I smiled at him. And that was how the trouble started.