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My dad popped into view again. “Friends?”
“Wow.” My mom’s mouth fell open. “Friends? You have friends? How good is that! What do you need? Do you want a gift card? Order some food too? Gas money? Are you going out drinking? Remember, our family doesn’t do well with red wine. You have to remember that.”
Nothing subtle about them.
I thumped back onto the bed and sighed. The two of them had been pushing for me to go out and make some friends after Thomas. Actually, they’d specifically made a six-month step-by-step plan for me to make a friend and presented me with a laminated copy on my move-in day. Me, having multiple friends? Above their hopes and dreams. Of course they were psyched.
“Should we tell her?” my dad whispered.
I glanced at the screen. “Tell me what?”
“No, not right now,” my mom muttered back. “She doesn’t need it right now.”
“You guys know I can hear you, right?” I gave them a long look. “Just tell me. Please just tell me. It’s all I’m going to be thinking about for—”
“Thomas visited my office a few days ago,” my dad said.
In an instant, my blood ran cold. The messages had been coming for such a long time, they didn’t shock me anymore. But him approaching my parents was another thing entirely.
My mom and dad had adored Thomas Sullender. They didn’t understand football or Division I athletes or what a quarterback was, but our family moved around so much when I was a kid that it’d been hard making friends. When I first started dating Thomas, it’d been like a dream come true for my parents. Finally, their little girl had found her community.
It crushed them when we broke up.
How were they going to react when they found out I was tied to another football player?
But not like that. Not in a—I leaped from one relationship with an emotionally unavailable playboy football player to another emotionally unavailable playboy football player—because Adam and I were not connected in that way. Or any way. The shower thing was a one-time moment of weakness. A mistake. Nothing more.
“Well, what did you and Thomas…talk about?” I asked carefully.
“He wants you to know that he’s sorry…?” my dad trailed off. “I don’t know, kiddo. That was it.”
“Have you thought about…?” My mom struggled with the question I knew she’d been sitting on for months. “You see, he apologized…”
Not this again.
I closed my eyes.
The truth was, Thomas only apologized because for some sick, twisted reason he liked everybody thinking he was the good guy. After I broke up with him, he went around campus with the craziest stories. I “cheated” on him. I pushed him away with my “neglect” and forced him to get busy with bleacher bunnies out of sheer desperation.
And now he wanted my parents on the list of the sympathetic Thomas train. While still harassing me.
I needed to tell my parents everything.
Or I could drop the bomb about Adam and it would at least get them off my back about Thomas.
Not everything-everything but at least something. Something to prove that I was doing okay. Because if there was one thing both of my professor parents would understand, it was a special project to work on.
“So…” I cleared my throat. “There’s something I have to tell you…”
My mom leaned into the phone. “Hm? What is it?”
“Did she say what it is?”
“No, Carl. Hush. Piper, what is it?”
Tell them, tell them, tell them.
“There’s a…” I tugged at the bottom of my dress again. “There’s this…”
