Casanova(70)

How could I have known how he felt back then? We were best friends, but I thought that was it. He was too good for me, and our teenage years weren’t an angsty young adult novel or a cheesy chick flick movie. They were real, and in real life, the guy at the top of the social totem pole didn’t fall for the girl who was close to the bottom.

Those things had changed now, of course. But back then, it was everything.

He’d loved me.

He maybe never stopped.

He maybe loved me right now.

It was too much. His words rolled around my mind over and over, echoing again and again until I winced with every thought. I couldn’t take that knowledge—I couldn’t put all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that he was together and make them fit.

It didn’t fit. It didn’t make sense. Young or not, you didn’t say what he said about someone you care about. Not even in private.

Was that what always hurt most? That—if what he’d said back then was true—he hadn’t said it to my face? It would have been easier to swallow. It probably wouldn’t have felt like such a betrayal.

And now it felt like a double betrayal.

I’d loved him. He’d loved me back. He’d lied.

He’d hurt me for absolutely no reason—no reason other than his own ego.

Perhaps that was the thing was unforgivable. Not what he said, but why he said it.

Eighteen or not—hurt like that didn’t go away overnight, not when the person who hurt you as much as he had me. It didn’t go away in eight years, either. Because some things just didn’t.

But now it had. The only problem was that pain had been replaced by something worse. Happiness that he hadn’t meant it, but anger and hurt that his he’d valued himself above me when I knew he valued so many others above himself.

My car door opened, breaking into my thoughts.

Connie sat herself in the passenger seat and looked at me. “You’re crying.”

I wiped at my cheeks. “What do you want?”

She studied me for a moment before her expression softened. “Brett called me.”

“Oh.”

“He said he knew why you left town, that he’d fucked up, and that you looked like you needed me.”

That was all it took.

Seconds later, I was leaning across the car, my face pressed against my big sister’s shoulder.

She held me while I cried out all those years of unnecessary hurt and resigned myself to the new pain.





CHAPTER TWENTY


BRETT



“Brett Walker! What the hell did you do to her? And what are you doing out here? Do you have any idea how many times I’ve screamed at you?”

“Yes,” I answered without turning around. “Your voice, much like a group of cats fighting in an alleyway, tends to transcend time and space quite easily.”

Camille clipped me around the back of the head and sat down next to me on the sand. “Ass.”

I slowly nodded, flicking a broken shell up into the air. I’d been doing it ever since I got off the phone with Connie and she told me she was going to see Lani. I didn’t know what else to do. I wanted to go after her, but I knew by the look in her eye it was the wrong thing to do. Sending her sister was the best option I had.

“What did you do?” Camille asked me, her voice now much softer than her previous screeching. She nudged her elbow into my arm. “Come on. Tell me.”

“Graduation. I spoke to Stevie Lewis before we all left about the party we were having.” My voice was completely flat, and now, I held the shell in my hand instead of flicking it up and down. “He asked me if Lani would be there, and I laughed. Told him no, why would she be? The only reason we were friends was because of your friendship with her. I looked out for her for you. That she was only the girl who’d helped me keep my GPA up. That she was nobody more than your friend. She was nothing to me.”

Camille took a deep breath in, but she didn’t speak.

My thumb ran over the light grooves of the cream and brown shell. “I’m why she left. Me. Because I was a naive fucking idiot, and I broke her heart. I was in love with her but my ego got in the way. She loved me and she heard. I’m the fucking reason for everything. The reason you lost your best friend. The reason I lost mine. The reason Connie rarely saw her sister. The reason the rest of her family have barely have seen her since. I’m the stupid fucking reason she left, because I hurt her so badly she couldn’t be here anymore.”

She punched me. Straight in the upper arm. It hurt like fuck as the sting from her fist radiated across my skin, but I didn’t yell at her. I didn’t do anything except pick the shell back up because I’d dropped it.

“You deserved that,” she muttered, rubbing her knuckles against her thigh.

“Yep.” I flipped the shell over and looked out to sea. “I broke her and now she hates me so much I can’t fix it.”

“Some things aren’t meant to be fixed. Some things have to stay broken because they need to be replaced.”

“I figured that much out. Except I’m the thing that needs replacing for her. She deserves somebody who can love her right.”

Camille slowly turned to face me, her eyebrows raised. “Are you admitting that you’re still in love with her?”