He shook his head. “Club business. I can’t talk about it. But it’s a rough time for us, and I’m worried that you attaching yourself to me is going to put you in more trouble.”
I sat upright and crossed my legs. “What does ‘club business’ mean, anyway?”
“I can’t tell you, that’s the whole point.”
I snickered. “We’re friends, right? You know I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“It’s not personal. It’s just work. I can’t talk about what goes on behind closed doors.”
“So, I’m in more trouble than I assume that I am, but you can’t even tell me about my own life? What kind of sense does that make?”
He pushed himself up from the futon. “Rose, if there’s any other way we can go about this with Blake, we have to give it a shot.”
I balked. “You’re really not going to tell me? After everything we’ve been through in our lives?”
He threw his hands into the air. “What have we been through in the past few years, Rose? Huh? Why don’t you tell me what you did to keep our friendship going?”
“That’s not fair, and you know it.”
“You vanished, Rose,” he said as his voice grew in volume. “You vanished into thin air, ghosting me after years and years of friendship. We were practically siblings. We did everything together, and then you just left, and I’m supposed to act like that didn’t happen?”
I leapt to my feet. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m just saying that if you know something about my life that I don’t, I deserve to know.”
“Well, you sure as hell knew what Blake was manipulating you into, and you didn’t have any issues with ghosting me instead of being honest.”
I scoffed. “That’s different, and you know it. I was being abused, Caleb!”
“Well, your abuse doesn’t give you the right to write off what you did to me. Do you at least understand that?”
I ground my teeth together. “I had to ghost you, Caleb! Blake made me! It was the only way to—”
He hovered over me. “If you even attempt to make this about my protection, then as far as I’m concerned—”
“As far as you’re concerned, you’re fucking what,Reaper?”
I spat his nickname out at him and slapped him across the face with it. Who in the hell did he think he was, trying to protect me from my own safety? That didn’t make any fucking sense! If it was private, then he needed to keep his god damn mouth shut.
Caleb shook his head. “Why have you always had such shit taste in men, Rose? What the hell is it about you?”
His words slammed directly into my gut. “I don’t know.”
He let out a heavy sigh. “Can we just—”
“I’m so sorry, Caleb.”
I barely got the words out before the tears started all over again, and for fuck’s sake I was so god damn tired of crying. I wiped quickly at my face before turning my back to him, and it was only a few seconds later that his hands descended upon my shoulders.
Before he massaged them.
“I’m so sorry,” I choked out. “For everything. I had been so in love with Blake when we first met. He promised me the world. He promised me a way out of all this. And I believed him. I believed him when he told me that I was his world. That he wanted nothing more than to love me, protect me, and take care of me for the rest of my life. I didn’t know that meant I’d have to act the way he wanted me to every second of every day just to get that kind of life. I didn’t know, Caleb. Not until I was entrenched in it.”
He moved his swirling fingers down my back. “I know.”
I kept wiping at my tears, wishing them to be gone for good. “That man is so good at talking someone in circles. It’s why he’s such a good lawyer. And I was so in love with him that I was blinded by everything he was doing. He manipulated me. He made me feel like I could never be with anyone else. That I wasn’t worthy of it if I couldn’t make things work with the easiest-going man on the planet. He convinced me no one cared for me like he did.”
“I always cared for you, Rose.”
The second he sank his fingertips into my lower back, I groaned. I fell forward, barely catching myself against the futon mattress as my hips jutted themselves into the air. I felt his pelvis right up against my ass crack. I moaned into the velveteen futon mattress cover as his hands smoothed out over the tense muscles of my lower back.
