Addicted to You (Addicted #1)(53)

“I wasn’t sure.” I bite my fingernails. “So…you didn’t think I had sex with him?”

His eyes fall to the floor, and then very softly, he says, “I wouldn’t have blamed you, if you did.”

My lungs suffocate underneath invisible weight. Tears prick my eyes. He wouldn’t care if I slept with someone else? He expects it.

“I should have been here,” Lo explains, more to himself. He keeps shaking his head, probably wishing to reverse time and strangle the boy who passed out too early, who wouldn’t answer my calls. “If something happened, that’s on me, not you.”

“Please don’t,” I say, bracing my body against the door. It keeps me upright as much as the chair does him. “Don’t give me a free pass to cheat on you. If I cheat, it’s real. If you’re not here, it’s real. You want to save me from the guilt if I sleep with someone else? Well, you can’t.”

His eyes grow red. “I’m not any good at this.” Not good at a relationship? At being with me? At trying to drink less? He doesn’t elaborate what this actually means. So I’m left to guess. He finds a beer in his drawer and twists off the cap, a surprising choice considering the low alcohol content. Weirdly, it’s almost like a peace offering, an “I’m sorry” for Loren Hale. Only he can apologize with alcohol.

“Why didn’t you answer your calls?”

“My phone died sometime during the night. I didn’t know it until I woke up.” He motions to his desk where his cell docks in the charger. Then he edges closer to me and pries my hand off the door, intertwining his fingers in mine. He spends an awfully long time staring at the way they lace together.

“Where were you?” I breathe.

He licks beer off his lips. “A bar a couple blocks down the street. I walked.” He leads me into the middle of the room, my feet gliding with his. Something’s wrong. I see the cold, jagged pain in his eyes, so deeply cut that it can’t be all from guilt—from me.

He turns up a pop ballad and then draws me close. He lifts my arms around his shoulders and then slides his hands on my hips. Lo sways to the beat, drifting, but I plant straight in reality while he tries to forget.

“What happened?”

He looks right at me and says, “Nothing.” I almost believe him. His brows even furrow a little, appearing confused.

“Maybe you’ll feel better if you tell me,” I whisper.

He stops moving, and his eyes cloud. Lo stares up at the ceiling for a moment, shaking his head before letting words slide off his tongue. “I called my mom.” Before I can ask, he says, “I don’t know why. I don’t know…” His nose flares, holding back an avalanche of emotion.

I wait for him to continue, even though a weight bears on me and my breath has been lost to the past. He knows the question I want to ask.

Quietly, he says, “You were at the library, and my mind started going. I just, I don’t know. I looked up Sara Hale on the internet and found her number.” Even after their seamless and discrete divorce, she kept Jonathan’s last name to retain some of his fortune. He constantly complains about it, but there’s nothing he can do now. She walked away with a billion dollars in assets and a chunk of the company as a shareholder.

“Are you sure it was the right number?” By his staggered breathing, the call must have gone badly.

He nods, his gaze flitting around the room. He looks lost. I keep my hand in his, but he’s somewhere far, far away. “I don’t know what I planned to say,” he tells me. “Maybe I should have started with, ‘Hey, thanks for getting knocked up just to marry my dad and take his money’ or ‘Hey, thanks for nothing.’”

“Lo…”

“You know what I said?” he laughs, tears building. “Hi Mom. Like she means something to me.” He rubs his mouth in thought, and he lets out another short laugh. “After all these years of being satisfied with not knowing a thing about her, I finally call. And she says, ‘Who is this? Loren? Don’t you ever call this number again.’ She hung up on me.”

My mouth drops. “Lo, I’m…” sorry—for what, his mother being a freeloading, gold digger who willingly handed her child off after a billion-dollar settlement? “It’ll be okay. You’re not missing anything good. She’s a horrible person.”

Lo nods. “Yeah…yeah, you’re right.” He inhales a deep breath. “I shouldn’t have called her. I wouldn’t have gotten so trashed. I just wanted to stop thinking about it.”

I squeeze his hand. “I know.”

“Come here.” He draws me to his chest and then kisses my forehead. “I’ll do better. I’ll try harder for you.” He rubs my back, keeping me in the warm embrace for quite some time. I want to live here. In his arms. Where I know it’s safe. “We’re okay?” he asks softly.

“I think so.” I take a peek at the clock. Connor must be waiting, counting the seconds, each tick another point off my future exam.

Lo places his hands on my neck and inspects me closely. “You’re shaking.”

“I’m fine.” I glance hesitantly at the door, wanting to do things with Lo but not having the time. Not with my tutor in the kitchen.

Lo suddenly understands my reservations. “I’ll distract him for twenty minutes, and you can stay in here and watch something. I’ll bring you a tape from your room.”