Opening their messages sent me tumbling down. They’d been close for a long time. Under a client label I recognized, their chat read like the old, intimate messages Ethan used to send me—sweet, flirtatious, electric. In a single day, he could send her thousands of messages, far more than he had said to me in the last two years.
[Ethan, I’ve reserved a VVIP seat for your performance tomorrow. Please come support me!] Together with that message, Dulce had also sent him the ticket location and seat info.
I just found out that she was an arts student, majoring in piano.
I remembered telling Ethan once that I wanted to learn piano because girls who played instruments had a certain charm. But he’d just shrugged and dampened my enthusiasm, calling piano “pretentious upper-class nonsense.” Yet he coaxed Dulce into competitions and said he wanted to see her shine on stage.
After reading their conversation, I marked the messages unread and went back to lie down, but sleep did not come. When dawn finally allowed me to drift off, I was jerked awake by a knock on the door.
There he was, standing and blinking resentment into the morning light.
“Babe, I slept on the floor all night. Why didn’t you look after me?” he demanded.
How was I supposed to “look after” him? Like a top-class free maid?
“Don’t call me that,” I said coldly. “I’m Jillian, not your babe.”
Jillian's POV
He was flirting with Dulce and already calling her “darling.” Then what did that make me, the official girlfriend? Nothing.
Whenever he called me “babe,” all I could think of was how he’d calculated me into his family as a free maid.
Seeing the dark circles under my eyes, Ethan hesitated, then offered an excuse. “Lost sleep again? It’s that damn client, wouldn’t stop pouring drinks on me.”
At work, Ethan was always smooth with clients. He was the kind of man who got others drunk, not the other way around. And every time he passed out, it had always been when he was with me.
He used to tell me I was his favorite cocktail, which was able to make him drunk without forcing a drop.
Men really could play drunk well enough to make you cry, so I no longer believed his lies.
“It’s fine. Work comes first,” I said, keeping my voice level.
“By the way, you’ve got lipstick on. Wipe it off later,” I added, pointing to his collar.