A drunk, depressed Connor reading through these, with a bottle of painkillers readily available?
Yeah, it was no surprise he was in the hospital right now. Thank God that was where he was, not the morgue.
My fury was ready to be unleashed when I got to our dorm room, but Chloe and Abby weren’t there. Of course Chloe wouldn’t be here to face me. Somebody who would post that video didn’t have the courage to face the repercussions.
I’m in our room. Don’t come back anytime soon.I pressed the button to send the text to Chloe. It sounded a bit more dramatic than I’d intended, but I was okay with that. I needed some time to digest all the emotions roiling through me, and I could not deal with seeing her right now.
If I hadn’t seen Ches coming out of Logan’s room, I would have packed a bunch of my clothes and just gone to his house to hang out until I could stand being in the same living area as Chloe. Not that that would be anytime soon.
But now that option was gone.
Maybe not on Logan’s end, if his behavior when I broke things off with him was any indication. He had seemed hurt. He seemed like it was more than just one of the girls he was currently sleeping with stepping out of the picture.
Emily was not in our room, and I was grateful to have the suite to myself. I took a shower, and when I dressed, I reached for my mom’s Bribury shirt and put it on, needing to feel her presence. I would have called her. I would have told her everything. Or most things. Probably would have left out how amazing the sex with Logan had been.
She would have sympathized over my breaking up with Logan. She would have been furious at Chloe too.
She would have just been a mom telling her daughter it would all be okay.
And I would have believed her.
Even though I had slept deeply through the night before, I was exhausted. I climbed into my bed and looked one more time at the video, my stomach clenching at the sight of Ches fixing her hair. And her boots—ones I had envied—as she stepped around Connor and Paige.
I was not equipped for this right now. My mom’s death had left me exposed and ready to spark, like a wire that had its coating worn away. I had said as much to Logan after our first Wednesday session, while eating a burger with Stick and Jane a table away.
At the time I had meant the emotions that falling for a guy would unravel in me. Especially a guy I knew did not want anything more than a casual fuck. Maybe a few.
Which was what I’d wanted out of this year too, but I knew it would never be that with Logan Fields. Neverjustthat.
And I knew I wasn’t ready for that. But what I really wasn’t ready for was the crushing emotions I felt today. They were tangled up with what Connor—and to a lesser degree, Paige—was going through, but the sense of loss felt like a weight on my chest. And the knowledge that I could have avoided the whole thing if I hadn’t been so desperate to sleep with Logan had me bristling with doubt about everything.
My phone lit up on the desk next to me and I saw a text from Logan.
Just realized the confusion. Watch the post again. It’s reversed. Veeti slept with Ches last night in his room.
Hope zinged through me, and I once again watched that fucking video. I couldn’t tell for sure if what Logan had said was true. Their hallway was a mirror image on each side, and all the doors were closed, so I couldn’t recognize which room belonged to whom.
Please, please, let it be true.
Would Logan get Veeti to lie for him? Would it come to that?
There was no way to tell about the orientation for sure, so I went back to the post before that one, where Chloe had scanned the crowd below her. There were Dex and Philly, neither wearing anything that would indicate if it was a reversed image. Neither were Dustin and Abby as they talked by the entrance to the dining room—
The dining room that was on the wrong side of the house!
It didn’t automatically mean that the next video had also been shot that way, but it was pretty likely. Relief surged through me. Logan hadn’t slept with Ches. Maybe hewasas committed as I was. We hadn’t had the talk, hadn’t said the words, but I couldn’t have been alone in feelings that were so strong, could I?
I thought this discovery would ease the weight on my chest, but it didn’t.
Not completely.
Because I hadn’t trusted Logan’s feelings for me. On some level I didn’t believe that the Logan I loved would cheat on me. That was the humiliation I’d been feeling. That I’d been duped into thinking the relationship was more to him than it was. That was more overpowering than the anger that he’d cheat on me.
It was too much. All too much. I didn’t want to feel these emotions so strongly. I wanted the numbness that I’d felt for the past year, the cocoon that grief over my mom had given me. I’d started to put my phone away, ready to burrow into my bedding and pretend I’d never come back to Bribury at all, when another text came from Logan.
Going to practice now. Coming to your dorm after, probably three hours. We need to talk this out. Be there.
I had three hours to decide if I could handle the emotional upheaval—both good and bad—that came with loving Logan Fields.
