Scott remains sitting, his gaze locked onto mine. Candlelight carves shadows across his bare chest. Water still beads down from his hair and onto his skin. I should look away, but I can’t. Can’t reject what he’s silently asking. He, and this situation, make it impossible.
He looks at me like he’s bracing for something worse than the hurricane outside.
“You deserve to at least have closure.”
I shake my head. What would be the point? “It was so?—”
“Don’t tell me knowing why doesn’t matter to you, because I know it does. You can’t lie to me, little one. You, and this, have everything to do with why I’m on this show.”
I shrug, trying to feign indifference. “So what? You’re just going to say it regardless of how I feel?”
“I’m going to say it because I know how you feel.”
I hesitate. “I don’t?—”
“I never left because I stopped wanting you,” he starts anyway. “I left because I didn’t want to lose you. Creating distance was the only way I knew you’d be protected, be able to live your life peacefully.”
I tilt my head in confusion from his riddle of an explanation. “You left to not lose me? Creating distance to protect me? That doesn’t make any sense.”
He sighs. “I didn’t talk much about him to you back then because I didn’t want to put you in the middle of our beef or to worry about me.”
“Him? I don’t understand?—”
“It was Vincent.”
“Vincent? Like your father?”
He nods.
I vaguely remember back then Scott mentioning him. But those times were few and far between—and usually he was venting to me in anger and frustration. The very few times I’d met the man, he was rather condescending, but Scott ran enough interference to make our few interactions civil.
“What about him?”
“He was the reason I had to leave.”
Silence lands heavy after his words as I process what he just said.
Did I… Did I hear that right?
He leans closer, meeting my eyes. His eyes are filled with pain, raw, unguarded, like something inside him just cracked wide open.
The candle flames waver between us.
“During the spring break before I left, he’d found out about us. Exactly how he did? I have no idea. I just know that when we got back from that trip, he told me to break if off with you and that I had until graduation to, as he put it, find a more suitable match.”
I’m taken aback with shock and disgust, but I let him continue.
“As you probably had guessed the few times you two met, he cared very much about what high society thought. And his thoughts when you weren’t around often bled into my love life. Into how he felt about you and your family.”
“What an asshole. I knew he was a piece of work, but that’s awful.”
Scott gives a small grin of amusement. “Exactly what I said to his face when he demanded I take another girl out to dinner on your birthday instead of you because he wanted to do business with her family’s company. I refused.”
I can’t help but beam at him for protecting me like that. When the world seemed absolute bliss with him, it was chaos, unbeknownst to me. And even then, even when he was given the easy way out, he chose me anyway.
He then sobers. “By the time graduation rolled around, and he found out you and I were still dating, he went crazy. Blazing mad that night. He then gave me an ultimatum. Dump you right there and then, or you and your family would, as he said, suffer and blame me for it.”
“Suffer? How?”
