Breaking Her (Love is War #2)(3)

Sometimes he didn't even speak. Sometimes he just listened on the other end. This call started as one of those.

"If it isn't my heavy breather again," I said lightly into the phone. "Is there some particular word you're looking for, to get off faster?"

It was a joke, at his expense, but he seemed to take it seriously.

"Say Dante," he told me gruffly.

"Dante," I said gamely. Because tequila. "You're the bane of my existence. Stop calling me."

There was nothing but his disturbed breath on the other end.

"Even that did it for you, huh?" I took the dig at him with relish. "You dirty, old pervert."

"You're in a mood," he finally noted. He sounded rough. Rough as in terrible. I wasn't the only one drowning my sorrows with a bottle.

But he was right. I was in a mood. And it didn't bode well for him. "Why are you doing this?" I asked him, keeping my tone level. Mellow, even.

There was a long pause on the other end, but he surprised me by finally answering, "You keep answering. If there's a chance you'll answer, I'll never stop calling."

He was right. I'd stopped taking his calls years before our last disastrous reunion. Why couldn't I seem to do that now?

My self-destructive meter was running at full, and I hadn't found a way to bring it down since the funeral.

Maybe a bit of revenge would help.

One thing was for sure. It couldn't hurt.

I didn't really need to, we'd plotted it out several times prior, but just to be safe, I mouthed at Anton, "You ready?"

Anton grinned and gave me a thumbs up.

I held my hand toward him to let him know that he should wait.

"Okay, fine," I finally responded to Dante, my voice hardening, going from light to dark. "I'll stop answering, so you stop calling. This is pointless. Stop wasting my time. I've moved the hell on."

My nostrils flared as I pointed at Anton.

"Come back to bed, baby," his perfect actor's voice rumbled loudly at the phone, right on cue. God, he was good. He sounded sleepy, horny, just f*cked, and ready to f*ck again. The man deserved an Oscar for that one little sentence.

On the other end Dante made a noise, something indecipherable but unmistakably, unpleasantly, unbearably filled with pain.

Agony. Torture.

I think I had the phone to my ear, staring into nothing for at least five minutes after he hung up. I wasn't sure what I was feeling. Which was the problem. That little stunt had been designed to torment him, but, above all, to improve my mood.

Why had it done the opposite? Why did hurting him always hurt me?

"You know, we could just do it," Anton said sometime later.

I stared at him. "What? Sleep together?"

He shrugged. "Why not? What would be the harm? We're so much alike, it might actually turn into something, and if it did, it might be something good. And if not, no harm, no foul. We'd stay friends and forget about it, end of story."

I mulled that over, but I knew myself too well to fall into that trap. I decided to let him have the full, brutal truth of it, the fatal flaw in his harmless plan. "Here's how that would play out: the sex might be good for me, would be great for you, but the only way it's great for me is if I'm picturing you as someone else . . . Someone I hate. And then, in the morning, you'd be hopelessly in love with me, and it'd get weird, because I f*cking hate it when guys fall in love with me, and then I wouldn't enjoy hanging out with you anymore. How sad would that be for both of us?"

"Is he really that good?"

"He's the best I ever had. And the worst thing that ever happened to me."

True love is a bitch.

"And it's really that . . . hopeless? You can't even get off without him getting in the way?"

I was well aware of how pathetic, how epically f*cked up it was, and hearing it aloud hardly helped.

"It's hard to explain," I warned him. "But, basically, yes. I can't even eat a f*cking apple because of him."

"What?" he asked, sounding baffled, which was understandable.

"He even ruined apples for me," I explained.

"What?" he repeated.

"I have a memory, a very clear one, of biting into an apple—we grew up surrounded by orchards—and so we got the best apples. And I just have a memory of eating one fresh off the tree, sharing it with him actually, and thinking it was the best thing I'd ever tasted."

"Okaaay . . . And?" he prompted.

"It was a . . . special day, and every time I ate an apple after that it all came fresh to my mind.

So when it ended between us, horribly, I could never . . ." There was nothing quite so demoralizing as recalling your sweetest memories and feeling utterly bitter.

"That blows." His voice was succinct. He poured us another shot.

"They were my favorite fruit," I lamented. "Love sucks."

"And now your favorite fruit is the lime that chases our next tequila shot."

As far as pep talks went, it wasn't the worst one I'd ever had, so I toasted it. "Bottoms up."





CHAPTER TWO

"She burned too bright for this world."

~Emily Bront?