Ex Appeal (Ponto Beach Reunion #3) by Cathy Yardley

Author:Cathy Yardley [Yardley, Cathy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781662503962
Amazon: 1662503962
Publisher: ‎Montlake
Published: 2022-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

You just fucked up royally. Now what?

Emily sat in the small break room at her work, barely noticing the spice level on her favorite buldak noodles. She could—and generally did—eat them every week, a little indulgence despite the fact that generic ramen was cheaper. She loved it, loved the heat on her lips, the way she’d have to take little panting breaths to try and cool the spreading fire. Some of her coworkers called her masochistic, but she just shrugged and kept shoveling them in.

Today, though, she was fixated on the laptop, surreptitiously getting her bot up and running. She was careful not to show anything that she and Vinh had been working on—not that a lot of the people she worked with would be able to understand what she was doing, even if they did look over her shoulder—but she’d promised Vinh secrecy. Still, after last night’s scorching-hot lapse in judgment, she needed to pick up speed on the hacker side of things, so she wasn’t tempted to fall back into the physical side. She knew that Vinh was desperate to get his name cleared and get his career and life back.

Now, she was just as desperate—for different reasons.

Why did you sleep with him?

She huffed an impatient sigh at herself. As she’d suspected, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to think about anything else today. The best she could come up with: she’d slept with him because for a brief second or two, she’d seen the boy she had fallen in love with, all those years ago . . . and the man who had adored her before he then inexplicably hadn’t, abandoning her when she’d needed him the most.

When they were still teens, he could be aloof with people he didn’t know, which often read as coldness. It was something she chalked up to a mild social anxiety. But he could be charming with people when he had to be, like with her parents or when he’d interviewed for a school grant. And with her, he was more than charming. He was attentive and supportive. Often, he’d stared at her like she had somehow invented the moon. And he’d done little things for her, like leaving her little notebooks with pretty covers because he knew she collected them, giving her the last of his fries when they were at the Shack, or rereading her papers when she’d gone cross-eyed and lost all perspective. He’d taken care of her when she had been sick the first semester at NYU, even when her roomie had fled to her boyfriend’s place. He’d gotten her NyQuil and soup and watched Disney movies with her, even though he had been hellishly busy.

His sweetness was her kryptonite, all the worse because she knew how rare it was—how so few people got to see that side of him.

She’d fallen in love with him in middle school, the first time she’d seen him, even if they hadn’t done anything about it. When he’d made his first tentative move in high school, she’d all but devoured him.

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