No Strings Attached by Nicolette Day

curtains.
    “Jace?”
    No answer. She looked at the clock. Damn it! Her flight was leaving at noon. That only gave her three hours to get to the airport. Where the hell was he? Hayden grabbed her cell phone off the nightstand, turned it on, and breathed a sigh of relief when the screen lit up. Thank God it was working again. No way would she have had time to buy a new one before her flight. No messages from Jace. Just one from Lilly, asking what had happened to her last night.
    She climbed out of bed, a sense of dread washing over her. His clothes were gone. No. Jace wouldn’t have left like that. Not without saying good-bye. She padded barefoot into the kitchen and then into the empty living room, wrapping her arms around herself to prepare for the disappointment she knew was coming.
    There wasn’t even a note. Jace was gone.
    Hayden stumbled into the bathroom in a daze and touched her chest where the pain throbbed, making it hard to breathe. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to hurt this badly. They were supposed to walk away from this and still be best friends, but could she do that now? She gripped the bathroom counter and stared at her sleep-mussed reflection in the mirror. No. She couldn’t go back to the way things were.
    She took longer in the shower than she’d intended, wasting time sobbing into her loofah rather than getting her shit together for the most important trip of her life. She should have seen this coming. Jace had promised her one night of sex to erase that bastard Shane from her mind, and he’d done just that. She could barely remember anyone who had come before him. She didn’t want to. What she wanted was more. More of him, more of what they’d shared last night, but his little disappearing act this morning proved he obviously didn’t.
    She was in love with Jace, and now she’d lost him for good.
    The next three hours went by in a mind-numbing haze. By the time the cab pulled up to the airport terminal, she was pissed. Not at him, though. She wanted to be—she’d fallen back in love with him, and he couldn’t even stick around to have a waffle and say good-bye?—but she couldn’t. She’d agreed to this, knowing from the start what it was. The only person she could be pissed at was herself. She swallowed the pain, hating how much she missed him already, and paid the cab driver.
    She wrestled with her bags through security, and once she was through, her phone started to ring. She dropped everything, digging in her pocket, hoping, praying it was…
    Lilly. She sighed and answered. “Hey, Lil.”
    “Hey, yourself.” She sounded hungover. “Where are you?”
    “Airport,” she said. “Are you still going to be able to meet the movers today? And you have a key to the storage building where they’re taking everything, right?”
    “Will you stop worrying? I’ve got everything covered, babe. I swear.”
    Hayden sighed. “Do you have any idea how much I wish you were coming with me?”
    “I wish I were, too,” Lilly said. “But you know I can’t leave my brother. Not for that long. For now, I’m just going to have to live vicariously through you and your badass adventures.”
    Hayden gathered her bags and made her way to the gate. She glanced up at the big screen. Twenty minutes until boarding. Twenty minutes until she was on her way to putting an ocean between her and Jace. Feeling hopeless, she sank down into a chair, listening to Lilly go on about her night, which of course did not include being trapped in a storage room or screwing her best friend. The universe apparently didn’t hate Lilly as much as it hated Hayden.
    “So what happened last night?” Lilly asked. “Did you get down and dirty? You left your emergency bag in my car, so I’m assuming things didn’t get too exciting.”
    Hayden chewed on her lip, waiting for an older man in a business suit to make his way past her, and then blurted out, “I slept with Jace.”
    Lilly hesitated.