Chapter 60: Chapter Sixty

RAE

“You guys are nuts.”

Courtney rolls her eyes as she unpeels a clementine at our kitchen table, the one carried into our house by the mover who very much knew we had sex seconds before he arrived.

“You seriously bought a house off an app?”

“I have to agree with Court on this one,” her brother Brady laughs.

“It wasn’t entirely on the app. I toured it twice and signed the papers in person,” Logan says with a shrug.

“Wait. Just ~you~ toured it twice?” Brady’s eyes move between Logan and me. A look of absolute incredulity is plastered on his face. Just like his sister, he’s not afraid to display exactly how he’s feeling.

“I had work.” I mirror Logan’s shrug and hope he doesn’t have more to say about the subject.

Courtney has been part of my true self bubble for a while now. That’s the name I give to the very small—I’d say elite, but that would be a lie—group of people who I’m completely comfortable with.

The name is pretty self-explanatory. I can be my true self around them. I don’t clam up or go into panic mode when I’m with members of my bubble.

I’m still working on Brady.

He’s outgoing. Very, very, very outgoing. Loud. Boisterous. Sarcastic. He has a lot of opinions, and he won’t hesitate to interrupt you if he decides that one needs to be expressed.

I don’t get the impression that he concerns himself with other people’s feelings all that much.

Not exactly the type of person I thrive around, but he’s Logan’s best friend, so I’m trying my best.

“You couldn’t go after work?” he asks.

I resist the urge to shrug again. Something tells me Brady will make a comment if I keep repeating Logan’s gestures. “I’m pretty tired these days.”

Brady reaches his hand across the table to touch my belly, like he’s trying to verify that an actual baby is in there draining my energy, but Logan and Courtney smack it away.

“Dude,” Logan groans.

“What?” Brady furrows his brows. “Oh, am I not supposed to do that? Sorry, Rae. You’ll come around to me eventually, I promise.” He winks.

“Uh, I—” A bunch of responses, none of them adequate, start up a sparring match in my head. Am I supposed to reassure him?

Do I say I don’t need to come around, that I’m already there? Do I tell him that a friend of Logan’s is a friend of mine? No, definitely not that one.

Court comes to my rescue, muttering, “Brady, ~I~ haven’t even come around to you.”

He snorts and pounds his fist on the table. “So, Autumn. Does she have a middle name yet?”

She does, as a matter of fact, but we haven’t told anyone yet. Zach had a unisex middle name, and we decided that we’d give Autumn the same one, with a small spelling change to make it more feminine. Our baby has a pretty sweet name, but I just really, really want to keep it between us.

I don’t know. Being pregnant is weird, especially now that I’m showing. Everyone knows I’m having a baby. Everyone knows I had sex. They know that in a couple of months, I’ll be screaming my head off in a delivery room. I was pretty open about expecting a girl, and I didn’t withhold her first name either, mainly because I’m in love with everything Autumn. Thanks to my bump and Autumn-related excitement, I haven’t had much privacy with this whole pregnancy thing.

So, after we decided on her middle name, I asked Logan if we could keep it quiet until she’s born. He says yes to pretty much everything baby-related—I actually think he feels guilty I’m the one who has to carry her, which is kind of cute, like a male guilt sort of thing—so he was on board with not telling the world what’s to come between ‘Autumn’ and ‘Quincy’.

However, Brady doesn’t seem like the type of guy to accept ‘it’s our secret’ as an answer. I take my standard approach to uncomfortable social situations and turn toward my fiancé.

“Yep, but it isn’t Brady,” Logan deadpans. He nudges me and adds in a stage whisper, “He’ll forget it in a second if it’s not his name.”

I giggle. I fucking love him.

“Very true,” Court laughs. “Alright, I need to get going. Rae, Logan, thank you for the clementine and the house tour. In that order. This was fresh as fuck.” She pulls me into a hug. I try to stand, and she just says, “No, stay. We can do chair hugs until Autumn graces the world with her presence.”

This is why she’s in my true-self bubble. I could cry.

“Rae, great to finally meet you.” Brady shakes my hand. I wonder if Court and Logan scared him away from initiating any contact beyond business gestures after the belly-touch attempt. No complaints here.

“I’ll walk you guys out,” Logan says. He disappears outside with them, and I try not to think about what they’re discussing out of earshot.

Logan and Court are definitely telling Brady to go easy on me, to let me warm up to him. ~Explaining me~.

I’ve heard the whole ‘Rae isn’t so shy once you get to know her’ monologue half a million times in my twenty-four years, and it never fails to make me feel horribly inadequate.

“So, what does Brady think of me?” I ask the second Logan returns to the table with our mail. I don’t even bother to keep my voice casual. Logan knows me too well.

He kisses me softly. “He likes you.” Smirking, he adds, “Don’t tell me you’re surprised. You’re the most amazing, fantastic, wonderful, incredible person in the world.”

I can’t wait to marry this human thesaurus, but I still raise my eyebrows. There’s definitely more. Brady’s a talker.

Logan sighs. “He thinks you’re out of my league, and then he asked if you have any single friends who, and I quote, ‘look like Rae.’ Don’t worry. I told him you don’t.”

A grin spreads across my face. ~Oh~. They didn’t have to explain me. “I passed the best friend test?” I squeak.

“Rae, you know we’re engaged, right? If I had any tests, you would have passed them already.”

I nod. “That is a fair point.”

He chuckles and shakes his head. “Here. You got mail. No return address.”

Anxiety is a real bitch. Normal people would just think, ~Oh, that’s weird~, and then they would open the envelope. I, in contrast, immediately panic.

I mean, what if Michael is sending Anthrax? He’s out on bail, and he hates Logan and me. Or Taylor? She probably heard about the pregnancy and our engagement and…

“I got it,” Logan offers. Before I can beg him not to sacrifice himself, the letter is open. All that was in there is a folded piece of notebook paper. Nothing poisonous.

Except its words.

~Rae~,

~I’ve been madly in love with you for over two years now. Being unfaithful was the greatest mistake of my life. I owe you an explanation.~

~I bought you a ring. I was going to propose on Christmas. For reasons I no longer understand, I thought I would give myself the experience of being single.~

~I’ve always been in relationships, and I convinced myself that I was missing out on something.~

~I wasn’t. Every girl I was with has nothing on you. You’re intelligent, beautiful, funny, and kind. No one holds a candle to you, Rae. I really hit the jackpot with you, and I ruined what we had.~

I pause to swallow the bile rising in my throat. Courtney very much ~does~ hold a candle to me, and I’m sure the other ~women~ (not ~girls~) he hooked up with do too.

~We’re good together. We understand each other. You’re unique. I don’t think you’ll find someone who understands you as well as I do.~

~Learning that you were engaged to another man killed me. I couldn’t believe you had moved on so quickly, but then I heard about the baby. You’re making a terrible mistake, but we can fix it together.~

~I still love you. You don’t have to rush into marriage with a man you barely know just because you’re pregnant. I’ll raise his child as my own; that’s how much I love you.~

~The man you’re with isn’t a good person. He can’t offer you support, stability, or a family that will love you the way mine already does.~

~He’s the type of man who’s looking for arm candy. You shouldn’t go through with this marriage, Rae. Once you have the baby, your body~

There’s more, but I don’t read it. I can’t. Tears pour down my cheeks. Fuck him. Fuck him for playing on my insecurities. Fuck him for believing he knows what I need. Fuck him for his sexism and pathetic excuses. Fuck—

“Rae?”

I wrap my arms around Logan’s neck and sob into his shoulder. I squeeze him close, inhaling his cologne and the scent of our fabric softener, while he whispers that he loves me.

Jake’s words are lies. I know that. Jake knows that, but they still burn. As much as I hate it, he knows me better than most, and that means he knows each and every single one of my weaknesses and insecurities.

“Do you want to—” Logan starts.

I wipe my eyes. “It’s f-from Jake. It’s awful. You can…can read it if you want, but—” I stop mid-sentence when Logan lifts the discarded paper.

His brows furrow as his eyes move left to right across each line. “This is horseshit,” he growls.

“I know,” I whisper.

“How close was he with Miles?”

I blink. Not the question I was expecting. “Uh, close enough, I guess. We were together two years, so they got to know each other pretty well.”

“Some of the shit in that letter is exactly what Miles said to me at your family party. Verbatim.”

Anger toward Jake dissipates as a tsunami of hurt and anguish crashes down on me. “I don’t… I don’t get it.” I really, really, really do not.

This isn’t the Miles I know. My brother was always there to support me. He stood up against bullies. He played with me on the playground when no one else would. He set me up with his friends so I didn’t have to go to prom alone.

Even with his weird attitude around Logan, I never would have expected this from him. Not this letter. Not collaborating with my ex-boyfriend to break up my engagement.

The betrayal stings a million times more than Jake’s words.

“Why would he, Logan?” I whimper. “Why would Miles do that to me?”