My Best Friend Stole Him. So I Stole Better. Chapter 11
I saw Sienna and Julian again three days later.
Ethan had come to pick me up from work. We ran into them outside.
Sienna’s eyes were red. She bit her lip, looking at Ethan.
“I need to talk to you.”
Ethan glanced at me.
Sienna scoffed. “You used to check with me before doing anything. Now you have to check with her?”
Ethan spread his hands and leaned lazily against the car.
“She’s my fiancée. Soon to be my wife. Why wouldn’t I ask her instead of you? Are you actually worth asking?”
I couldn’t help smiling.
But a small part of me worried. What if Ethan still had feelings for Sienna?
If that were the case, there’d be no point in us getting married.
I said, “Go ahead and talk.”
Sienna wiped her eyes and stepped aside with Ethan.
My gaze stayed fixed on them. Sienna’s voice was low, hard to make out.
But Ethan, as though he wanted me to hear, said loudly, “What? I don’t have feelings for you anymore. My Summer’s the best!”
“Not happening. Have a meal with you? I don’t have time. I don’t even have enough time for Summer.”
I burst out laughing.
I turned around—Julian was watching me. His expression was complicated.
After a long moment, he asked, dazed, “So you actually loved him?”
I paused. Nodded.
He forced out the words. “The bottle of water you handed me that day—was it so you could look at him?”
The bottle of water?
I remembered. It had been the first time I’d ever spoken to Julian.
“No. It was for you.”
“Julian, don’t do this. Yes, I loved you. But I love Ethan now. And honestly? I regret the three years I wasted on you.”
His eyes went red. He shouted, “You bitch! Then how could you stop loving me?!”
Since he’d lost it, I saw no reason to be polite anymore. I laughed, cold.
“You knew I loved you. And you got together with my best friend. Neither of you told me. Neither of you turned me away. Was it because it looked funnier that way? Did I look like more of a fool that way? You don’t deserve to be loved by me!”
Julian scrambled to explain. “It wasn’t like that. Sienna said if we told you, you’d be angry…”
I laughed.
“Oh, so we wouldn’t have been angry if you didn’t tell us? And you thought my birthday was the right time to break the news?”
“Julian, I did love you. But I’m not stupid. You—you’re nothing like what I thought you were. Everything I gave you looks disgusting to me now.”
Julian’s hand shot out and grabbed my wrist.
I couldn’t shake him off. I frowned.
The next second, a figure came flying in and Ethan’s fist connected with Julian’s face.
His voice went ice-cold.
“Touch my fiancée again, and it won’t stop at one punch.”
Sienna stared at our joined hands, jealous.
I raised my eyes slowly.
“You’re not fit to be my friend. Get out of my life. Don’t let me see you again.”
…
The days that followed, Ethan and I did well together.
We did fun things. We worked together. We saw the world together.
I heard Sienna and Julian broke up.
The next time I saw her, she was on her knees, begging to move in with me.
She’d lost her job. Whatever she’d found next didn’t cover her expenses.
Without me, the free ride, she had to pay her own rent, buy her own food and clothes.
She could no longer stomach the life she used to live.
When I refused, Sienna staggered to her feet, her face twisting.
“This is all because of you! Why does your family have money? Why do you get to do whatever you want, while my life is a disaster?!”
“Don’t think I don’t know what you were doing. All that helping? You just wanted to watch me grovel!”
She’d been jealous of me all along. Her family had abused her, and she’d forgiven them, over and over.
Everything I’d done for her over the years, she’d seen as me showing off.
I lifted a cup of tea and poured it over her head. Sienna went silent.
“You deserve it. Bitch.”
Some people were never meant to have friends.
Sensitivity and self-loathing weren’t excuses to hurt others.
I lost interest in her after that.
I heard that shortly after breaking up with Julian, her savings ran out.
Sienna’s father, Roy Hayes, drove his beat-up pickup from Alabama to New York to drag her back to their little town and marry her off—to a man more than a decade her senior, one the whole town looked down on.
I never learned whether she got away.
As for Julian—he’d been on the fast-track PhD program, close to his defense, when I heard a crazy woman had broken into his lab. She’d trashed the place, deleted every draft of his dissertation and every backup of his experimental data—and stabbed him.
Years of work, destroyed. That stab wound put him in the hospital for months.
When he got out, Julian was rumored to be dealing with PTSD.
He couldn’t do experiments anymore. Couldn’t do academia. He scraped together some ordinary job.
I heard his parents nearly cried themselves blind.
At that point, Ethan and I were on holiday in Vienna.
The lights of the Christmas market ran all the way to the banks of the Danube. The smell of mulled wine hung in the air.
He surprised me with a bouquet of flowers and a small, elegant box. His nose was red from the cold, tucked into the couple’s scarf we were sharing.
“Happy anniversary, wife!”
I smiled.
“Happy anniversary.”
—— END ——