Bittersweet Symphony (Bittersweet #4)(28)

“I mean there may have been a rumor or two that spread about them, but you can’t believe that kind of shit. Why don’t you just ask her yourself?”

I glare at him. He is going to tell me these rumors.

“I can’t ask her myself because for some God awful reason she won’t tell me. I know they used to be friends but I want to know why they aren’t anymore. Tell me these rumors.” I am not asking, I am demanding.

Rolling his eyes he says, “This was like three years ago… How the hell am I supposed to remember that far back?”

Oh, f*ck no. Raising my fist I pound it on the table in front of him. Landon is a big guy, but I can take him.

“You best try to remember…” I say between clenched teeth. I am getting angrier every second that I have to wait for the truth.

“Dude…”

“Tell me,” I demand. His eyes lock with mine as he lets out a sigh.

“He wanted her. I knew he wanted her, everyone did. He had stuck by her side for years. Then one day he told her, and she said she didn’t feel the same. I don’t know what happened between them or what set him off, but I know that from that day on he hated her. He made her life hell. Anyone who stuck up for her, he took down too.”

Well, if that doesn’t get my insides burning, I don’t know what will. So the little f*cker is turned down and he decides that instead of moving on, he will inflect hate and pain on my Kennedy? She’s not yours…

“You’re telling me she turned the f*ck-nugget down and he retaliated by being a douche?”

“Basically,” he says as if he isn’t surprised in the least bit by my reaction.

“Did she do anything to stop him? Did he ever hurt her?” If he says yes, I swear to f*cking God, I am going to go find Sam and rip his balls off and shove them through his eye sockets.

“I don’t f*cking know… It’s not like we were best friends growing up.” Landon is getting irritated with me.

“Tell me,” I demand, a fury like no other flowing deep within me.

“Fucking-A. I don’t know. Not that I know of. It’s not like she could say shit to him. If she did, it would only get worse… What the hell is this all about anyway?”

I take a step back, a coolness blanketing over me. Okay, so he didn’t do anything to her. At least not anything that has me wanting to head over to his house and get stab happy on his ass.

I contemplate telling Landon. It isn’t like he doesn’t know her or what has happened. “Some shit with Sam went down last night, and Kennedy got all freaked out. I wanted to know what really happened instead of the sugar coated bullshit she tried feeding me.”

Landon gets up from the table, his bowl scraping across the wood. He stands directly in front of me.

“I know you want her, and you quite possibly, or maybe you already do, love her, but know that she’s been through the wringer so many times. If she keeps quiet about something, it’s for a reason. After all, we all have our own secrets.”

He walks away, and leaves me glaring at the table as my fingers dig into the wood. Anger isn’t even something I should be feeling at this moment. Except it is. I am angrier than I was before. I am seething. Landon knows I have secrets, everyone does. Some are smart enough to never hint at wanting to know them, while everyone else thinks they can dig into me and expose them. It never works out that way.

I never let them get close enough for it to happen. Except Kennedy. I let Kennedy get this close and now it is ripping me apart. Now I know why every woman I ever turned down is heartbroken when I don’t open up to them.





Kennedy


“You have to go to the party with me,” Clare, a classmate of mine, whispers in my ear as we scribble notes down. Professors wrote extremely fast. It is no wonder people got carpel tunnel.

“I don’t have to go anywhere.” And I won’t be going anywhere. Since the Sam and Ryder fight, I have been trying to stay low. I don’t want to draw any more attention to myself. I know Ryder is doing the right thing, but at the same time it felt as if he is setting me up for self-destruction.

Ryder has come into my life like a raging hurricane, drenching everything that made me who I am in a cold rain. He barreled through my walls one by one, destroying anything and everything that I have put up to protect myself. When it comes to him, I am defenseless, and in the midst of everything, that made me weak in a way. Only because Ryder ended up being that weakness.

“You have to. It’s going to be a rager, like the best party of the year,” Clare says examining her lip gloss in a hand held mirror. We aren’t friends, mainly just acquaintances simply because we sit next to each other. Clare is above me. Not because I put her there but because socially she has more friends and is wanted more by everyone.

“I don’t do parties.” I don’t. I had those couple of sips of whiskey with Ryder and that is probably going to be all I drink for the whole year.

“You do. Everyone in college does parties and men. We do lots and lots of men.” She says, looking at Kane Fisher’s back, he is more known as a God to the women of the campus than anything as if he is the last chocolate bar in the world.

Kane and Clare will be the couple of the school. If he will give her the time of day. She stares at his back like she is now since the beginning of the semester. She looks like a lost little puppy who is kicked time after time.