The Crush Ward Penelope (best novels to read for beginners .txt) 📖

knew this was a dead-end road, yet my brain still tried to come up with any excuse to move forward with what my body needed.

Then I had a lightbulb moment that was likely brought on by my dick: Maybe it was better to give in and get it over with. Maybe there was a way to do this without Nathan ever having to know. I offered her a proposition before I could change my mind.

“The fact that we can’t keep our hands off each other doesn’t change the fact that we don’t have a future together, Farrah.” When she looked down, I placed my hand on her chin so she would face me. “Look at me. This will never work long term. If we choose to keep playing with fire, we have to do it with the understanding that there’s an end point.”

A look of concern crossed her face. “End point?”

“We have to end it before Nathan finds out. He’ll never speak to me again, and he’ll treat you like shit.” I must have been crazy for what I was about to suggest. “Maybe we spend the next month…getting it out of our systems. After the month is over, I’ll move out of the house, so we can have some space to really think about things. Now that Nathan has a job, I feel better about doing that. He doesn’t need me anymore.”

She looked hurt, and I couldn’t blame her. But I didn’t know how else to handle it.

Farrah finally spoke. “So…just be together on the down low for a month and then you leave? That doesn’t sound like a good deal.”

“We’ll see where things are at that point. But either way, I move out of the house, since I think that’s best for all of us anyway.”

Farrah stared off for a bit. “I don’t want you to move, but I understand. It’s better to plan on that since we don’t know how this will end up.”

“I agree.”

She looked out the window, seeming to contemplate my proposal.

Then she turned to me and nodded. “Okay. A month.” She reached for my hand and looped her fingers in with mine. “Where are we going tonight?”

“I don’t think we should be alone tonight. Nathan thinks you’re at Kellianne’s. What are the chances she’ll let you sleep over there for real?”

“Pretty high…unless she has a male guest, which is rare.”

“I’ll go to my parents’ house. Let Nathan think I changed my mind and decided to stay over at Alyssa’s—pretty sure he wanted to be alone with Crystal anyway.”

Boy, I seemed to have no problem lying tonight—lying to Nathan about my whereabouts, and lying to myself, because deep down, I knew there wasn’t going to be any such thing as a clean break after a month’s time. Someone was going to get badly hurt. Possibly two people I cared about. All because of my selfishness.

This felt like a runaway train. I just hoped it didn’t crash and burn, taking all three of us down with it.

• • •

I thought maybe I’d get lucky and be able to sneak into my parents’ house with both of them sleeping. All I needed was to somehow get to my dad’s underwear drawer. But after I used my key to enter, I unfortunately found my mother sitting on the living room couch watching television.

She lowered the volume. “What are you doing here?”

Without saying anything, I rushed past her to their bedroom. Dad shifted in bed as I opened his drawer as quietly as possible to grab a pair of his boxer shorts. It was too dark to find pants, so I’d just settle for these. I couldn’t let my mother know why I needed to change my pants. If she asked, I’d pull something out of my ass.

On my way back out to the living room, I dumped my dirty jeans in a corner of the guest room where I’d be sleeping.

My mother’s eyes widened when she noticed me wearing only a T-shirt and Dad’s gigantic boxer shorts. “What on Earth?”

I plopped down on the couch. “I’m spending the night.”

“And you found the need to take off your pants the second you got here?”

“They have engine grease on them. I was fixing my truck. I wanted to be comfortable.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What kind of trouble did you get yourself into?”

“I told you what happened.”

“I’m not talking about your pants. I mean why are you spending the night?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“This is about Farrah, isn’t it?”

Fuck.

I put my feet up on the coffee table and ran my hand through my hair. “What do you want me to say? You knew from the last time you started to grill me that something was going on there…”

“Does Nathan know?”

I crossed my arms. “No. And he never will.”

“What happened exactly?”

“What part of ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ don’t you understand, Mother?”

She smiled. “You know, when I was younger, I had an affair with your uncle Rod’s best friend, Stephen.”

That surprised me. “Really?”

“Oh yeah. I was only eighteen, and Stephen was a couple years older. Your uncle found us together, hiding in the shed behind Grandma’s house.”

“Well, damn. What did he do?”

“He beat the snot out of Stephen.”

I chuckled. “That sounds like Uncle Rod.”

“That was the end of their friendship.”

“No surprise there. What about you and Stephen?”

“We continued to sneak around for a while. He was really sweet to me, but eventually my feelings waned, and it was too stressful to continue upsetting Rod when it didn’t seem worth it anymore.”

I rested my head on the back of the sofa and stared up at the ceiling. “This story is basically confirming what I already know. If Nathan were to find out about anything happening between Farrah and me, our friendship would be over.”

“Well, that’s the thing. It could be over temporarily. But years later, Rod actually admitted that he regretted his reaction. So, it was a friendship wasted. I understood that the way he found out was