Something Reckless
Page 51

The doorbell rings, and I jump.
After closing my laptop, I hurry toward the door and look out the window. Hanna, Nix, Cally, and Maggie are standing on my porch, their arms loaded with grocery bags.
I open the door and my throat goes thick with tears. I am so grateful for my friends. “What are you guys doing here?”
“Cheering you up,” Hanna says, pushing past me.
Cally follows her to the kitchen and chimes in with, “Pretending to be something more than a diaper-changing milk machine for a few minutes.”
Maggie wraps me in a hug. “Hanna said we needed a girls’ night. So here we are.”
“Yeah, here we are,” Nix says with a grin.
My smile wobbles. “You guys are the best.”
“We know,” the girls say in unison.
I follow them to my kitchen, where Hanna is producing the ingredients for chocolate martinis. When she was going through everything with Nate and Max last year, this was how we cheered her up. Since Cally and Hanna both have babies at home now, martini nights are a rare occurrence. “It means a lot to me that you guys came,” I say as we gather in the kitchen. “Now give me vodka.”
Hanna pours dark brown liquid from the martini shaker into a glass then thrusts it in my hand. She makes more for the other girls as I drink.
“So I’ve decided this is the creepiest thing ever,” Nix says after draining half of her martini. “You need to tell Sam about this Riverrat guy so you can get to the bottom of this.”
Cally shivers. “Someone was meeting at you at their cabin. Nix is right. That’s just creepy.”
I can’t disagree. The whole thing is just too coincidental and weird. I might think that it was some big scheme to trick me, and Sam was in on it, but that doesn’t make sense. What would he get out of that?
“I don’t want to tell Sam,” I say. “It would only hurt him, and there’s no reason to tell him when nothing is going to happen between us.”
“You don’t know that,” Hanna says. “I still believe he really likes you.” When I give her a look, she says, “Likes you for more than sex.”
“To be fair,” Maggie says, “whether or not you have a future with Sam, you need to figure out who this guy is.”
“He still wants to meet me,” I say. “I could agree to that.”
Hanna shakes her head. “I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that. Why can’t he tell you who he is then you can meet?”
“He doesn’t know who I am either,” I say. “God, I’m glad I accidentally sent that picture of me to Sam through text when I meant to send it to River through Something Real Chat.”
Nix frowns at me. “What are you talking about? You can’t send pictures through Something Real.”
“Sure you can,” I say. “I sent River pictures before.”
“You did?” the girls screech in unison.
“Not of me, exactly,” I say. “I was only bending the rules, not breaking them. I’d send pictures of tiny parts of me. My hip, my toes . . .” My cheeks heat. “You know . . .”
Nix folds her arms. “That’s so weird. There’s no way to send pictures from my account.”
We all turn to her. “You have an account with Something Real?” I ask.
She looks away. “You made it sound pretty cool, so I thought it was worth a try. But trust me, there’s no picture sending.” She pulls her phone from her pocket and messes with it for a minute before showing it to me.
She has the chat application pulled up and, sure enough, there’s no option to send pictures.
“I guess I thought it was pretty trusting of them to let us have that when we were supposed to be anonymous,” I admit. “But it’s in beta testing, so maybe it’s just a glitch.”
“Back to River not knowing who you are,” Maggie says. “Why does that matter?”
I shrug. “I could end it. I could just delete my account and the program and never talk to him again. It’s gotta be someone who lives in the area, so it’s better that we don’t know each other, right?”
“But you liked him,” Hanna says. “That’s gotta mean something. Why not find out who he is and then see if you can make it work?”
Maggie shakes her head. “But that’s gonna be all sorts of complicated if it’s someone connected to the Bradshaws.”
“Or if it’s one of the actual Bradshaws,” Nix says. “It is their family cabin.”
“It’s the Bradshaw family cabin,” I repeat, but I’m starting to get hysterical again and it comes out in a squeak. “Sam even told me last night that Connor uses it a lot to give Della space when she’s in her moods. Connor.” I lift my hand to my mouth. I feel sick again. “Oh my God.”
“Liz?” Hanna says. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
I draw in a ragged breath, but it’s hard. My lungs are too horrified to accept air. “What if I’ve been having this online relationship with Connor?” I shake my head. “No. He wouldn’t. He’s married now, and regardless of what you guys think about what happened last summer, he’s a really good guy.”
The girls all exchange a look, then study their nails, the counter, their drinks, anything but my face.
Cally’s the first to speak. “Did River say why he didn’t show up last night, Liz?”