Never Sweeter (Dark Obsession #1)(74)

“You know who. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I do but I’m pretending otherwise in the hopes you’ll come to your senses.”

“I just…if it was all just a game, why didn’t he laugh once it was all over? Why didn’t he toss away the mask and turn into a total dick? Mock me about my sex noises and jeer at me for believing him? He had to know that he couldn’t spin it out beyond that point. He had to get that I would never trust him again.”

“Maybe you shocked him. Maybe he had an attack of conscience.”

“That sounds right. That sounds plausible. I can believe that,” she said, but heard how the words sounded. Mechanical, like a robot version of her trying desperately to make things fit.

“And people can be two things at once. They can grow fond of you and think of you as a sweet person and still want to keep treating you like shit. In fact, most of the world revolves around that very premise. People treat the people they care about like garbage, shocker.”

“God that sounds even better. You’re really good at this, keep going.”

“So you’re not looking for some hope from me that he’s essentially not a piece of shit.”

“Christ no. The opposite. Tell me how bad he is. Tell me he’s the worst.”

She expected the answer to follow immediately after those words.

But none came. Instead, there was just a long silence.

There were just Lydia’s pitch-black eyes, regarding her with a gravity she suddenly couldn’t stand. She had to glance away, only when she did all she could see was Chad’s face. The way he had looked when he told her about the f*ck f*ck f*ck and the email address and oh god.

“I talked to his buddy today. Only his buddy claims Tate hates him.”

“You mean Chad Kilpatrick? The guy with the dark hair and the monobrow?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. That’s him.”

“Tate does hate him. Or at least, they don’t hang out anymore.”

“They don’t? You know that for sure?”

Lydia paused, as though considering some next move. Maybe wondering if she should make it or not—and still hesitant when she decided the answer was yes. Her voice was halting when she spoke, her gaze too soft and sad. Several times she seemed to want to stop, but she kept going.

“I don’t know anything for sure. None of us do. That’s the whole problem with the human race—our big design flaw. Pretty much everything relies on us being able to guess what someone else is thinking, and yet we hardly ever get it right. We can’t possibly get it right. I could tell you a thousand times that I hate you, while one I love you was right there in my head all along.”

“That was…that’s a pretty cool way to look at things.”

“It doesn’t sound like you think it’s cool.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No. It sounds like you’re really upset.”

“Maybe because he said a thousand times that he hated me…” she started.

But she couldn’t finish the thought. It was too awful to even contemplate. Too hard to think about him in high school with that one I love you lodged in his head. Each time the idea surfaced, she came close to losing her lunch, and after a little while of sitting with it the tears just forced their way through.

They were running down her cheeks and invading the sensible parts of her brain.

And it was their fault that she blurted out what she did.

“I just can’t stop thinking about what Chad said to me. And I know, I get how stupid that is, and I see that it makes me an even bigger fool than you thought I was for falling for him in the first place but I—” she babbled, but thankfully Lydia cut her off with a hug. And words, good, good words.

“Oh, sweetheart, I don’t think you’re a fool. I think you saw a chance at something nobody ever gets, and you took it. Of course you took it.”

“And then I threw it away.”

“You had reason to. You had every reason to. The evidence was—”

“The evidence was a bunch of mostly cute pictures he sent to himself.”

More silence rushed in after that bombshell. Worse: Lydia pulled away.

Not by much, and only so she could look at Letty’s face.

But it still felt bad.

“Why would he send pictures to himself? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No. You’re right. It doesn’t. Unless you haven’t got the first f*cking clue how to back your shit up and think emailing everything is definitely the way to go.”

“Are you saying here that Tate is that kind of guy or…”

“Tate is definitely that kind of guy. And he’s also the kind of guy who uses one password for everything, meaning I could definitely check if Chad’s claim is true.”

She looked at her friend then, though she didn’t know what she was hoping to find.

Understanding seemed like a long shot, until she saw the hopeful light in Lydia’s eyes.

“I think you should probably…”

“I know I should probably. But I just…I can’t. I can’t. I’m terrified of what I’m going to see. I’m terrified of what I won’t see. I’m terrified of everything always and I don’t know how to stop.”