Wrong for You (Before You #3)(57)
“I wanted to tell you. I really did. I didn’t mean for it to happen like this.”
“When? Before or after you f*cked me, or were you saving the big reveal for the day you left Montana? You know, a little parting surprise. Oh, and by the way, I’m famous, but it was fun slumming it with you. Have a nice life,” she mocked in a patronizing tone.
He reached for her hand, pulling it from her face. She slapped him away. “Don’t touch me,” she warned through clenched teeth, her voice unnaturally flat and totally lifeless.
“Dammit, Violet, it wasn’t like that. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think you’d give me a chance to know you otherwise. You’re not the type of woman I normally date. You’re too good for me.”
“Seriously?” She sat up on her bed, letting her legs dangle off the side. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
He wrapped his arms around her so quickly she didn’t have a chance to push him away this time. “I wanted to tell you so many times and last night after I met with my dad, I tried, but it didn’t happen. You told me nothing I could say would change your mind.”
Prying her hands between their bodies, she tried to shove him away. For a long second, he tightened his arms around her and she inhaled his spicy, citrus scent, letting it fill her lungs and sear her heart with bittersweet love and betrayal. When he lowered his head and brushed his lips across the top of her hair, she clung to him, burrowing her hands into his shirt, running her nose along his chest while her heart begged her to give him another chance, but she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t be a weak little puppet, so she shoved the words she needed to say out of her mouth. “I can’t do this now. I need space. I can’t think around you.”
He nodded, then dropped his arms before standing up near the edge of her bed, staring at her with miles of regret and sadness. “I never meant to hurt you. Please remember that.” His words were so soft, reverent even, and so uncharacteristically Alec that she had to look at him even though it hurt to do so.
She took in his hooded blue eyes, the white, barely there, scar lancing his eyebrow, and his subtly crooked Roman nose, and she realized she didn’t know this man. Sure, she touched every inch of him with her mouth and hands, indelibly burning him into her memories and her heart, but she didn’t really know him. He was Alec Reed, the drummer of Chasing Ruin, and that made him someone entirely different from the person she kissed just that morning before reality crashed down on them. “I don’t even know who you are,” she whispered, the words scarring her throat as they exited her mouth. Her irrational and totally untrustworthy heart screamed at her to take her words back, that she did know him, but her mind was done being ruled by her heart. She had to think rationally.
“Baby,” he pleaded. “You know me. I’m still the same person as when we woke up this morning.” He lifted her hand and pressed it against his chest over his rapidly beating heart, but she refused to uncurl her fingers. It hurt too much to touch him. She could feel the severed pieces of heart that had bloomed with hope over the past few weeks wither inside of her chest. “You know what’s in here. Chasing Ruin…that doesn’t matter. It’s not my identity. That’s not me. It’s what I do, but what I shared with you is me…the real me. And the real me loves you.”
She shook her head, her pale blonde hair floating around her shoulders. “If it wasn’t you, or at least a big part of you, you wouldn’t have hid it from me. It wouldn’t have been a big deal.”
“I wanted you to know me, not the person the world or gossip websites think they know, and the only way that could happen was to keep it from you just for a little while, not forever. Is that so bad?”
“Yes.” Even as she said the words, a little part of her wanted to fall back into his arms, but she wouldn’t. If she let him back in now, he’d only hurt her later because she could never compete for his attention once he walked back into a reality that was so far from her realm of comprehension, it might as well have been another galaxy. “I can’t do this. Who you are, what you did, changes everything.” She pushed the tangled strands of hair from her face. “You need to get out of my room, my house. I can’t look at you.”
He flinched as though her words mortally wounded him, and it took every ounce of willpower she could gather from every centimeter of her soul not to apologize and wrap her arms around him. She hated hurting him. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his black jeans that perfectly molded the contours of his toned long legs. “No, I’m not leaving until you understand. I won’t let you push me away without trying to work this out.”
Another wave of anger mixed with agony rushed through her and she couldn’t take it. She needed to get away from him. Being around him confused her and twisted her around until she didn’t know who she was anymore. “I don’t want to work this out because when I look at you now, all I see is a liar. I could never trust you. I could never love you.”
Alec reeled back as though she’d shoved him and for a long, fragmented moment she wanted to take back the words, but she couldn’t because he was liar, no matter his intentions. She watched as his beautiful blue eyes clouded with hurt and a frigidity that she hadn’t seen in weeks.
“If you’re not going, I am,” she finally said when he didn’t make any move to leave.