She shakes her head, dark red waves tumbling everywhere. “I don’t want to believe your lies. I want to hear the truth. So just give it to me.”
I hear the ping of the elevator arriving, but I know my sister is still standing in the hall and isn’t going anywhere. “Zoey. Come inside. I swear I won’t feed you lines. I just want some privacy.”
“I didn’t plan that last night. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t.” Her hands unfold and drop to her sides, and she looks at her phone. “I just wanted you so badly and I…didn’t think.”
“I didn’t think either. Until after, and then I thought too much.” I reach for her. I can’t help it. I have to touch her. I manage to grab the sleeve of her long silky shirt. She doesn’t pull away, but she doesn’t let me capture her hand either, so I just cling to the fabric. “Baby, I just got overwhelmed. Not by the sex but—”
“Who was your last girlfriend?” she interrupts, her eyes lifting from my hand clinging to her sleeve to meet mine.
“Why does that matter?” It’s not an answer, but I don’t care. It’s irrelevant. “The past is the past, right? You said you don’t care.”
“Did you date Tessa?” The minute Zoey asks the question Dixie sucks in a breath so loud we both hear it. Oh my God, I hate her right now. Truly.
“Go. Home!” I bark, glaring at Dixie.
She nods and punches the elevator button again. It must still be there from when she ignored it the first time, because the doors open instantly, and she disappears inside. As they close, I turn my focus back to Zoey, who looks like she might cry. Fuck. She yanks her arm away from me and the fabric of her shirt slips from my fingers.
My blood is starting to boil. “Come inside.”
I step toward her and manage to grab her wrist before she can step away. She lets me pull her into the entrance, but she takes a step back. I reach up with the other hand and push my fingers through her hair to cradle the back of her neck and turn her so her back is against the inside of the doorjamb and she can’t back her way into the hall again. She’s rock hard, every muscle, nerve and tendon taut. I press my forehead to hers. “I shouldn’t have left last night. I’m so sorry. I wasn’t freaking out about the sex.”
She puts her hands flat on my chest. Well, one is flat on my chest, the other is still holding my cell phone so it’s pressed against my chest. She closes her eyes and takes a shuddering breath.
“Did you date Tessa?”
“Yes.” I tighten my fingers in her hair. I’m scared to let go. My eyes are pinched shut, and I’m scared to open them. I don’t want to see her face. I’m scared of how she’ll look at me.
She reaches up and wraps her hand around my wrist, pulling my hand from her neck. My eyes open as she uses her other hand, the one pressed to my chest with my cell phone, and pushes me back a few steps. Her eyes are swimming in unshed tears. “Take your cell.”
“Zoey, please. Let’s talk about this,” I plead, reaching up to grab my phone before she lets it drop from her grip. “She’s with Levi now.”
“Yeah. And you hated that,” she announces, her voice unsteady as she pulls her own phone out of her purse and starts to fiddle with it. I open my mouth to speak, but she suddenly turns her phone screen toward me, and a video starts to play.
I recognize myself instantly. I watch the whole drunken, gross spectacle, my heart beating slower and slower with every sickening frame. And then I hear myself slur angrily,“I shouldfuck one of her friends. I mean, Carla’s not her only one. I could find another girl she knowsand parade that in front of her face.”
My eyes fly from the screen. There are tears sliding slowly down her anguished face. “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong, Zoey. I swear.”
“I’m thinking I love you,” she confesses and shoves her phone in her bag with a shaking hand. “I love you, and that makes me feel like an idiot. Like I’m that crazy person repeating the same mistake, expecting different results.”
“I’m not a mistake. We are not a mistake.”
“Was I revenge? Was I a way to give Tessa a taste of her own medicine?” She doesn’t give me time to respond. She just wipes at her tears and keeps on talking. “I’m someone she knows and a teenage fantasy. Two birds, one stone.”
“You really think I’d do that?” I ask, my voice as broken as hers now.
“You’re that guy in the video. You said it.” She sniffs and steps backward, into the doorway.
“I’m not that guy anymore.” I hate that I have to tell her this. That she doesn’t see it.
“No, you’re the guy who leaves in the middle of the night after sex to go meet up with Kina,” she replies, and I freeze. Fuck. How the fuck does she know that?
My expression—the shock—must look like guilt to her, because her face falls even further, and fresh tears start to fall. “I’m such a fucking idiot.”
As she storms to the elevators, something inside me snaps. Or breaks. Maybe it just dies. But I’m suddenly swimming—drowning—in a level of pain I’ve never felt before. And it’s making me wild with rage. “You really fucking are,” I snap and her eyes widen. “If you can’t see how I feel about you,how I am around you, then you’re a fucking idiot.”
She’s furiously punching the elevator button over and over, but she stops and turns to me. “I’m different? Me? The barely divorced, barren, teenage whore with little more than a house to her name?”
Holy shit. How can she talk about herself that way? “Stop.”
