The Dating Experiment Final

by Emma Hart

  Mellie: REAL SEX OR DREAM SEX

  Peyton: WHAT

  Peyton: WHAT THE

  Mellie: Chloe explain

  Peyton: WHAT THE FUCK

  Peyton: WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN

  Peyton: HOW DID THIS HAPPEN

  Mellie: I think the how is pretty obvious, Peyt

  Me: He slipped on a banana peel, and his penis accidentally ended up inside my vagina.

  There. That ought to explain it.

  Peyton: Well, shit. Elliott’s been putting it in the wrong hole the entire time.

  Mellie: Well, he’ll be disappointed when he moves from your asshole to your vagina.

  Peyton: He’s never put it in my ass.

  Me: She meant your mouth.

  Peyton: Please explain how you ended up having sex with my brother.

  Me: Like, from the start? Because I don’t have time for that. I’m in a crisis over here.

  Me: We had a fight, then we had sex, then we had another fight, except in that fight he told me he wants me and is crazy about me and all the little things he does that he never told me about.

  Mellie: THIS IS GREAT!!! Why are you in crisis?

  Me: Remember how your boyfriend got me drunk and I texted Warren?

  Mellie: Oh no (Phoebe's voice)

  Me: Oh yes. He literally said, “I’m crazy about you,” and idiot over here goes, “I’m seeing Warren tonight.”

  Mellie: You’re not still seeing him, are you?????

  Me: I don’t know. I’m supposed to meet him in an hour, but I don’t know what to do.

  Mellie: You tell him something came up, an emergency, and you order pizza because I’m on my way over.

  Me: You don’t need to come over.

  Mellie: I’m supposed to meet Jake’s highly-Christian aunt tonight. I need to come over. What a shame. I’ll pick you up on the way, Peyt.

  Me: Well, okay, but this is me doing you a favor, you know.

  Mellie: I’ll stop for ice-cream, too.

  Me: K. We’re even.

  ***

  “Where’s Peyton?”

  Mellie put a brown grocery bag on the coffee table and grimaced at me. “I went there, but she said she couldn’t come because Elliott was on his way over.”

  I blinked at her. “What? I need her, and what?”

  “Oh, he was already there. He laughed and told her she was a shit-ass liar, which she is.” She pulled out two cartons of Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream. “Dom was on his way over there. She didn’t want me to tell you because she didn’t want you to think she was choosing him over you.”

  I rolled my eyes. “She’ll be texting you all night finding out what I’m saying.”

  “She will.” She grinned, both cartons of ice-cream in her hands. “And I told her to fuck off, she knows where we’ll be.”

  A gentle laugh escaped me, and I fluffed my fingers through my hair. I’d taken a shower after texting Warren and canceling due to a family emergency, and my hair had dried in a wavy mess—the kind that looked cute on little kids after they’d had wet, braided hair.

  Not so much on me.

  “Okay, that’s in the freezer.” She put the bag on the floor and dropped onto the sofa with me. “What happened?”

  I told her everything. The words flowed out of me like water from a faucet. From the second he knocked on the door until the moment he slammed it on his way out.

  Mellie twisted her lips to the side, looking at me with more than a little sympathy in her eyes. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said slowly and softly, “But this is everything you’ve wanted. You’re in love with him. Why do you feel this way?”

  “Because I made peace with it.” I pushed my hair from my face and rested my elbow on the back of the sofa to prop up my head. “I put every idea I had of us being together away and, for the first time, I was really serious about moving on. I was totally okay with the idea that I had to get over him, and I think I really could have done it.”

  “If he hadn’t kissed you.”

  I nodded. “If he hadn’t kissed me.”

  “Okay, but you can still do it. Just because you’ve kissed him and had sex with him doesn’t mean you still can’t move on. Or you should get a kitten and fall in love with that instead.”

  I paused. That wasn’t really a bad idea. But kittens did need a lot of attention… “I don’t know if I have the patience for a kitten.”

  She thought about it for a moment and said, “You’re right. You definitely don’t. But you still have the option to get over him. I think it’s totally okay for you to say, “I don’t want to do this anymore, it’s time to move on.””

  I chewed on the corner of my thumbnail. “But are there too many questions with that? I feel like if I do that, then I have to explain why I don’t want to do it anymore. Plus, we work together. We co-own the business. I can’t just turn that off or never see him again.”

  “Working together does throw a wrench in the works. Have you considered maybe finding another job?”

  “More times than I can count,” I muttered. “I love my job. And I love him. But is it enough to be with each other twenty-four-seven and not want to murder each other? How do you and Jake do it?”

  The doorbell went just as Mellie opened her mouth to speak. She held up a finger and jumped up before I could move. Returning seconds later with a grin on her face, she put the pizza box on the cushion between us and got comfortable.

  “First,” she said, “I’m going to say that you and Dom want to murder each other anyway, but that’s just how you work. And, honestly? It makes a hell of a lot more sense now that it’s out in the open about how he feels about you. You fought because you cared about each other but had to keep all that emotion inside, almost all the time.”

  Damn it. She was onto something.

  “Now that you have it all out in the open, you shouldn’t be at each other’s throats nearly half as much.”

  “Well, he has it out in the open. I didn’t do much talking,” I admitted. “And I definitely didn’t tell him completely how I feel, but I think he knows I feel something.”

  “At least y’all are catching up to what the rest of us have known for a while.” She shrugged and opened the pizza box. “You’re trying to base your decision on what your relationship is like now, but it’d be totally different. And second, me and Jake work because we’re not together all the time. If we work all day together, we’ll eat lunch together, but spend the evenings apart. He’s not there as much as he used to be, but it’s all balance.”

  “Like how you’re here tonight when you should be meeting his family.”

  “You should be on a date.”

  “I’m having a crisis.”

  She wiggled her slice of pizza at me. “And I’m helping with the crisis like a good best friend.” A grin stretched across her face before it dropped, and she put her pizza back into the box. “Honestly, Chlo, I think Dom’s right in a way about you not being willing to try. I think you’re willing; I just think you’ve wanted to be with him for so long that you’re too scared to try.”

  And, there it was.

  She’d nailed it. She may as well have whacked me on the head with a hammer because that was the goddamn truth.

  I’d wanted to be with him for years, and now the prospect was in front of me, it was terrifying.

  “You’re right,” I said, picking a stringy bit of cheese on the pizza. “I think…I think I’m so afraid of losing him that I’d rather never have him at all.”

  Mellie gave me a sympathetic smile. “Exactly. But is that worth knowing you’ll always have to wonder what could have happened?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, then stopped.

  I didn’t have an answer.

  I couldn’t answer that.

  And you know what?

  I didn’t want to know the answer.

  Chapter Sixteen – Dom

  Fuck this. Fuck it. Fuck everything.

  Especially fuck that douchebag I
stupidly set her up with.

  And especially, especially fuck my heart.

  Awkward silence reigned supreme in my sister’s living room. Nobody talked. The TV was on, just loud enough that it wasn’t the kind of awkward that made you want to get up and run away, but not so loud it was too much. The scratch of fingers against the bottom of a pizza box broke my concentration of staring into space as I blinked and focused just in enough time to catch Peyton stealing the last slice of my pizza.

  She grinned, eyes sparkling, and bit down on the slice.

  I shook my head. I wasn’t going to fight her. I didn’t have it in me. The day with Chloe had left me both mentally and physically exhausted, and knowing that she was spending the evening with Warren?

  It sucked. I couldn’t believe she’d said those words to me—that I’d poured my soul out to her, told her everything about how I felt, and that had been her response.

  In hindsight, she hadn’t said it to be spiteful. I knew that—hell, I knew it then. She’d said it just to tell me, and while her timing had left an awful lot to be desired, I hadn’t given her a chance to explain how it had come around.

  I hadn’t given myself a chance not to ask her to go. Even if she refused and said she had to, for whatever reason, I wish like fuck I’d stopped and asked her.

  Now, she was probably out with him, and it was eating me inside.

  I should never have acknowledged my feelings for her. Never should have gone along with that stupid dating thing. All I’d done was lost and lost again. My date was a bust, and I may well have broken my own goddamn heart in the process.

  “So,” Elliott said, wiping his hands on his jeans. “What are you gonna do?”

  I glanced at Peyton.

  “I know you fucked her,” she said around a mouthful of pizza. “She texted me. Something about a crisis.”

  “A crisis? Didn’t sound like a damn crisis when she told me she was seeing Warren tonight.”

  Peyton quirked an eyebrow.

  “She’s going on a date with him tonight?” Elliott choked on his beer. “What?”

  I shrugged a shoulder. “I didn’t hang around to ask. She told me, and I just left.”

  “You just left?” Peyton asked.

  “That’s the thing you’re bothered about?”

  “No, but, I mean, we were drunk when she texted him. As in, Jake made sangria, and we were white-girl wasted to the point that, if we’d been out dancing, we’d have been flashing our asses as we strolled down Bourbon Street.”

  “What are you saying?” I narrowed my eyes at her.

  “I’m not saying anything.” She held up her hands, but she didn’t look at me. “I’m just saying that she’s probably going out with him because she feels like she has to. That doesn’t mean she wants to. Haven’t you ever been on a date you’d rather gauge out your eyeballs with a rusty fork than go on?”

  I grimaced, nodding. “Fuck.”

  “I don’t know, because you showed up before I could talk to her more, but that’s my guess.” Peyton shrugged a shoulder. “She was drunk and confused and, more than a little upset that you’d kissed her—”

  “She was upset?”

  Elliott did a double-take. “Upset? Why the hell was she upset?”

  Peyton looked at him. “She accepted they’d never be together, then fucking Romeo over here goes and messes that up.”

  “Wait,” I said.

  She froze. “Fuck a fox.”

  Elliott patted her knee.

  Sheepishly, Peyton turned to me and scratched the side of her neck. “Yes?”

  I sat forward, shuffling on the cushion. “What do you mean by that? That she accepted we’d never be together?”

  “Um. I don’t know if I’m the best person to explain that.”

  “You’re not getting out of this. What the hell do you mean by that?”

  She shifted. “I don’t want to play twenty questions. Can we try shots instead? Yep. Let’s do shots.” She got up, but Elliott grabbed hold of her arm and dragged her back down.

  “No. You slipped up, so now you’ve got to finish what you and your big mouth started,” he said, wrapping both arms around her chest and holding her down.

  She licked his arm.

  “Not gonna work. I’m not letting go until you tell him. And if you don’t, I will.”

  “Oh, that’s dirty!” Peyton sputtered.

  “Can someone just tell me what the fuck you’re talking about?” I threw my arms out. “I’m so fucking confused.”

  She sighed, then sat up, still held down by Elliott. “All right. Fine. I’ll tell you. Remember a few weeks ago when y’all had a fight here? About you losing your keys and the tax forms?”

  I nodded. “She told me she couldn’t believe she once had a crush on me while you two shamelessly watched.”

  Elliott gave me a thumb up. “That’s the one.”

  “Well.” Peyton shifted when he loosened his grip on her. “She wasn’t entirely truthful when she said she’d had a crush on you. It’s more like she’s been in love with you for a really long time.”

  I stared at her.

  “And by a really long time, I think since we were kids.”

  What the fuck?

  “And you never told me?” I wasn’t even angry. I was numb. “You knew how I felt about her. How could you not tell me?”

  “It wasn’t my business, Dom. It wasn’t my place to tell either of you how the other felt, and the only reason I’m doing it now is because you’re so damn close, and I don’t think she’ll tell you herself.” She crossed her arms and sat right back. “And, you know. I put my foot in my mouth.”

  I dropped back against the chair. “I don’t believe this.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wanted to tell you. Believe me, I’ve wanted to tell both of you everything, so you’d get on with it, but I promised myself I wouldn’t unless it looked like you were doing it yourselves.”

  I ran my hand through my hair. I had no idea what to think about that. I couldn’t believe what she’d told me. Hell, when Chloe had admitted that she’d had a crush on me, I thought she meant a crush.

  As in, I was attractive, she wanted to kiss me, and she had minor feelings for me.

  Not that she’d been in love with me since we were fucking children.

  In love.

  She was in love with me.

  “Does she still feel like that now?” I asked, looking at Elliott. I knew he’d give me a straight answer. He had no loyalty to Chloe the way Peyton did.

  He hesitated, and that momentary silence gave me the answer before he opened his mouth. “Yes. She does. That’s why this is such a mess.”

  “Why does that make it a mess? She loves me. I’m in love with her. What is there messy about that?”

  “Everything.” Peyton got up and stalked into the kitchen. The fridge opened, and there was a clink, and she returned with a bottle of half-empty wine in her hand.

  “Explain,” I demanded.

  She sat and unscrewed the cap of the wine. “You have to understand that she hoped for ages that something would happen between you two. We’re not talking six months—we’re talking teens and her entire adult life so far. She couldn’t get over you because you’re together so much and it was impossible.”

  “So, about how long you’ve been waiting for a Hogwarts letter,” I said.

  “It could still happen, thank you very much.” She recapped the wine and put it on a slate coaster. “About a month ago, she realized it would never happen. Neither of you had ever shown any signs of making a move on the other, and I think she finally made peace with that. She was ready to move on, Dom. She wanted to. As far as she was concerned, you hated her, second only to how you tolerated her.”

  “Shit.” I rubbed my hand down my face.

  “Then…you kissed her, and you literally fucked up everything she’d come to terms with. Now, she’s all kinds of confused, because everything she thought would never happen has poten
tial to happen.”

  Elliott shook his head. “Women. Fucking women.”

  Never was a truer statement spoken.

  “But…I want everything she wants,” I said to Peyton. “Why is that so hard for her to accept?”

  “Because! Ugh, you absolute lumphead.” She smacked her hand against her forehead. “She accepted it would never happen. It was done. Finito. Never. Gonna. Happen.”

  “Well, if she’d told me how she felt, it would have happened.”

  “You could have told her. You had plenty of opportunities before you started to work together and verbally kill each other on a daily basis. It’s not her fault you never noticed all the times she was mega-bitch on the jealousy scale or—”

  “When the hell did that happen?”

  “Well, most recently? Ruby.”

  I stared at her. “I thought she just hated Ruby.”

  “She did. She looked like a fifty-cent hooker stuffed into a five-hundred-dollar wrapper,” Peyton said, matter-of-factly. “The point remains, she’s spent years watching you be with other people and being jealous. Treating you differently. Dropping hints. Just being someone who’s in love with you, while you’ve literally kept it all locked up and not even given a hint of knowledge that you were interested in her. It’s not her fault you were too dense to see it.”

  “Wait—are you blaming me for all this?”

  “Your timing was pretty bad, dude,” Elliott said.

  Peyton nodded. “I am. I have to blame somebody, and you’re the logical target right now.”

  “I’m your brother. What happened to sibling loyalty?”

  Hitting me with a scathing glare, she said, “Sibling loyalty went out the window the day you made all my Barbies punk rockers.”

  I shook my head. “I should have known that would come back to bite me.”

  “Hindsight is a wonderful thing, bro.” She grinned and stood up. “I’ll be right back.”

  I sighed when she left the room. “You agree with her?” I asked Elliott.

  He shrugged a shoulder. “Dunno. I’m not as involved in this as she is, you know?”

  “What would you do if you were me?”

  “If I was in this situation with Peyton?”