It’s been years since the Caleb you know has come around.
“Oh, God,” I whispered to myself.
Caleb settled his hands onto my shoulders. “It didn’t mean anything to me, Rose. I’m sorry.”
And when I opened my eyes, I found that his face had darkened. I no longer recognized the man standing in front of me. Gone was the boy that had cared. That had genuinely cared about the people around him. Gone was my best friend, who constantly sacrificed for the greater good. Gone was the future I felt in his arms. Gone was the life I saw unfolding in his eyes every time we climaxed together.
Gone was my heart.
Because he had destroyed what Blake hadn’t yet.
“I don’t even know who you are anymore,” I whispered as I stepped out of his grasp.
He scoffed. “Well, we haven’t seen each other in seven years. That tends to happen when so much time has passed.”
I turned my back to him. “You’re my friend, Caleb. How could you—”
“Friend?” he asked curtly.
I braced myself for the onslaught. “Yeah. Friends.”
“Rose, we’re barely friends as it is right now. I don’t hear from you for seven years, and then all of a sudden—”
“I get it, okay!?” I shrieked.
I shrieked so loud that I startled myself. The way my voice bounced off the walls and assaulted my ears made me wince. I wrapped myself up in my own arms and backed away from Caleb. I backed up as far as I could until my spine splayed itself against the wall. And as I looked up at the ceiling, still blinking back tears I refused to cry over yet another pathetic man in my life, I let go of the life I had seen last night.
I relegated myself to loneliness as I leaned my head against the wall.
“I get it,” I whispered.
Caleb’s voice was sharp. “We don’t go back to the way things were after one night of fucking. That isn’t how any of this works.”
“I’m not asking you to marry me, for fuck’s sake,” I said breathlessly. “I’m just asking you to see where this goes with me.”
“And my answer is no. You need to learn to finish something before you start it. You’ve always been terrible at that.”
That comment snapped my head up. “You little motherfucker.”
“What? It’s the truth,” he said as he took a step toward me. “You were always taking on more projects than you could handle back in high school, and now you’re doing it with men. You can’t even get out of your marriage before wanting to hop into a relationship with someone else, and you can’t even see how absolutely wrong that is.”
“Don’t do this. Please.”
He stalked toward me. “You’ve had shit taste in men all this time, and now you’re gunning for a guy who’s entrenched in a bloody war with another motorcycle crew? Can’t you see how absolutely insane that is?”
“Stop it,” I said as my voice fell flat.
“Maybe what you need to do is get out of your marriage, stop fucking around with men, and get your damn life together. You don’t need a man to complete you. You don’t need a man to be happy.”
“Shut up!” I exclaimed.
And as he slammed his fist into the wall next to my head, he sealed the deal.
He drove the last nail into his fucking coffin.
“Don’t be the woman your father worked so fucking hard to make sure you weren’t,” he seethed.
The resounding crack that echoed across the room was second only to the sting of my hand. I watched his head fall to the side, with spit slinging onto his bare shoulder. My nostrils flared with anger. My body moved before I could tell it to stop. And after I jammed my knee right into his dick, I watched him sink to the ground.
