Wrong for You (Before You #3)(58)
She brushed by him before he could respond to what she said, but he didn’t try to stop her.
“Vi,” Ryder yelled from the living room as she half-stumbled, half-ran by him, tripping over the corner of the rug and catching herself on the back of the sofa.
“I need to go.” She looked over her shoulder, catching Alec out of her peripheral vision, leaning against the wall, his hands folded against his chest, his eyes arctic and stormy and so guarded she wanted to weep.
“Wait, what’s going on?” Ryder said, looking at Alec instead of her and she took advantage of the moment, swiping her keys and phone off the entry table.
“I’m going out.”
“Why?” Ryder said, his eyebrows lifted. “I just got home.”
“I can’t be here, right now…not with him.” She pointed at Alec. “When he’s gone, call me and I’ll come home.”
“Goodbye, Violet,” Alec choked out as she stepped out the front door.
The finality threaded through his simple words caused a cataclysm of tears to fall down her face, blurring her vision, but she refused to look back. She needed time, time away from him.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Violet, what are you doing here?” Annette asked, flinging her door open. She’d been driving around town waiting for Annette to get home from work for hours.
“I can’t go home ever.” She walked in the door, not waiting for an invitation. She needed to talk to someone and it couldn’t be Alec or Ryder. While she and Ryder were close, spilling all the details of what happened with Alec over the last three weeks made her stomach turn. They weren’t the kind of things she could confide in her brother. “Or at least until Alec leaves. I never want to see him again.”
Annette walked over to her wine rack and pulled out a bottle of wine and two wine glasses, setting them on the coffee table. “What did he do this time?”
“He’s not who I thought he was,” she answered, dropping down onto the sofa.
Annette laughed. “Most men aren’t.” She opened the wine bottle and filled the two glasses with a dark red liquid.
“I can’t drink again. I tried that a couple weeks ago and I’m not interested in a repeat.” She shivered, remembering her headache.
“No, you have to.” Annette lifted one of the glasses and handed it to her. “Red wine is good for breakups and I’m assuming that’s what this visit is all about.”
“I’m not following your line of thinking, but yes…we’re definitely over.”
“You know the song written by Neil Diamond, but more famously covered by UB40 where he drowns himself in red wine to make him forget about some girl.”
“Right. That song.” She nodded. “Okay, I’ll have a glass or two.”
Annette tapped her glass against Violet’s before taking a sip. “So explain what you mean about Alec not being who you thought he was.”
Violet groaned. “He said he worked at some talent agency in LA, but when Ryder met him this morning, he flew into hero worship mode saying that Alec was the drummer for Chasing Ruin.”
Annette’s eyes narrowed. “I thought he looked familiar.”
“You did?” Violet said, leaning forward in her seat. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“I said I thought he looked familiar, not that I knew who he was.”
Violet chewed on her lower lip. “I feel so stupid and used,” she finally confessed, her voice shaky.
“So you don’t want him anymore?”
She rubbed her temples. “It’s complicated.”
“Did he tell you why he lied?”
She rolled her eyes, trying to be flippant, but she didn’t think she succeeded. “He wanted me to get to know him before he told me or something dumb like that.”
Annette didn’t say anything for a beat as she twirled the stem of her wine glass between her thumb and index finger. “That doesn’t sound completely unreasonable to me.”
“What?” Violet slammed her wine glass down on the coffee table, barely avoiding shattering the glass in her hand. “Whose side are you on?”
“Yours. Always yours…even when you’re wrong.”
“Are you saying I’m wrong?”
“No. You should be mad. He lied and now you can’t trust him and you can’t have a relationship without trust. He totally blindsided you and that’s not fair.”
She nodded. Alec f*cked up and she couldn’t be with him anymore. The logic and reasoning were clear-cut. Disappointingly, she didn’t think it’d be as easy to sever her feelings for him. “I can’t believe I didn’t Google him or look up any of his social media. Am I an idiot for not knowing or not bothering to look?”
“Why didn’t you look?”
Violet searched her mind for the answer, but she didn’t have one other than that Alec made her live in the moment. “At first, I wanted the help at the Foundation and he wanted to volunteer. He had references faxed to me and I didn’t do a background check because I was overwhelmed by my workload…and him,” she admitted. “He has this gravitational pull and from the minute I met him, he sucked me in.”