Wait With Me (Wait With Me, #1)(62)

But his words don’t even register in my mind as I slide my gaze to the left and see Mercedes standing there with her hands over her wide open mouth. Obvious tears have sprouted in her eyes.

Are those for this douchebag?

She looks up at me and drops her hands, her chin quivering uncontrollably, and she croaks my name. “Miles.”

She moves out to touch me, and I yank back from her and shake off Sam’s grip. I pin her with a serious stare. “Don’t talk to me.”

“Miles!” she exclaims with a shout. “I need to explain.”

“Explain this?” I roar, pointing down at her idiot of an ex weeping into a cocktail napkin. “Explain why I punched a guy for a girl whose name I don’t even know?”

A sob bubbles up her throat, and I can’t even look at her anymore. I turn, powering my way through the crowd of people who have all pressed in around us. I pass Lynsey near the bar, and she looks at me like a whipped puppy, but thankfully says nothing.

As I make my way through the doorway toward the stairs, my mind begins racing. You think you fucking know someone. You think maybe you’ve been wrong all along, and there are good people out there who can be honest and up front with you. Real.

But then you find out you were wrong , so fucking wrong that you have the bloody knuckles to prove it.

I pause in the stairwell and send my bloodied fist flying into the concrete wall. It does zero damage to the wall, but it takes the sting off the pain in my chest, and that’s better than nothing.

“Goddamnit,” I growl, shaking my hand, my knuckles cracking painfully into each other as I stretch my fingers out.

“Miles, wait,” Mercedes voice echoes in the dark stairwell, illuminated only by a sconce on the wall.

I’m tempted to ignore her and keep going, but I catch sight of her fumbling down the stairs in a pair of tall wedge sandals. She looks like she could fall at any second, so I stop just to get her to stop chasing me.

“What, Mercedes?” I growl, my hand clutching the metal railing so hard, it aches. “Or is it Katie?”

She stops two steps above me, her chest rising and falling rapidly. Her blue eyes are sad when she croaks, “It’s Kate. I was going to tell you.”

“When?” I ask, my voice ragged now that my adrenaline has slowed and I’m staring up at the woman I’ve bared my soul to these past several weeks. I look straight into her eyes and add, “After I fell in love with you?”

She sucks in a sharp, shaky breath and replies hurriedly, “I’m still the same person, Miles. I’m as much Mercedes as I am Kate. Mercedes is still my name, it’s just used on my books.”

“It’s your pen name?” I ask, and she nods her confirmation. “Then why fucking lie about it?”

“I don’t know!” she replies with a flick of her hands. “Because with my ex, I got used to hiding that part of me. But with you, I didn’t have to do that, not ever. Kate Smith is who I am when I’m not telling people about what I do. One of our first nights together, you told your sister about me. That’s something I’ve never experienced before, Miles.”

I shake my head in disbelief. “If I’m so open and accepting, then why hide your real name? You had so many chances to tell me. Do you know what an idiot I feel like for calling you Mercedes all this time? Every time we slept together. I feel like a fucking joke to you!”

“You’re not a joke, I am!” She steps down one step so she’s eye level with me and reaches her hands out to grab my face. “I liked you so much. All this time I liked you as more than a friend with benefits. I’m the joke because I thought I could be cool and casual Mercedes with no strings attached, but that was the biggest lie of all. I’m plain old boring Kate Smith, and I’m totally fucking falling for you, Miles.”

Her words have me yanking my face out of her embrace and dropping backward a few steps. I don’t care if she’s falling for me. I mean, look what happened tonight. She’s worse than Jocelyn. She’s going to rake me over the coals, and after going through all that shit for a second time, there will be nothing left of me.

I turn and look away from her emotional, tortured face. “I told you I don’t want drama, Kate. My ex did that to me over and over, and I’m done with that shit.” I look back and point up at the door at the top of the stairs. “I’ve never punched another guy in my life, and I just fucking broke that dick’s nose.”

“I’m sorry!” she exclaims, grabbing the railing and squeezing so hard her arm begins to tremble. “But I’m not perfect. I’m going to have drama in my life. And you can’t give me a zero-tolerance policy for drama because of your freaking baggage!”

I shake my head, refusing to hear any more. My mind is full up of bullshit tonight, and I can’t take another second. “I’m out, Kate, Mercedes, whoever you are. You can keep your drama and your lies. Keep living your life as your author name, your real name, with your boyfriend or ex-boyfriend. Gay, not gay. Whatever.”

“Miles, please—”

“No, I’m done.” I point at the area of space between us like it represents everything that’s happened since the moment she ran into me in the alley of Tire Depot. My tone is deep and final when I add, “This…is officially the end of our story.”