“Oh, I’m sorry…did your man not tell you?” Jennifer was the only one to answer me, but she certainly wasn’t doing me any favors. She made an exaggerated remorseful face before grinning with self-satisfaction.
“Really? No one wants to tell the sad tale of Scarlett Scott for the brat?” She looked around at her friends, who kept their faces carefully blank. No volunteers there. Then she shot a gleeful look at Neil and stood up with all the grace of a big cat, walking across the room to loom over me. “As you can tell, nobody really likes thinking about what happened on that infamous vacation. Guess I’m the only one who cares enough, princess, to clear these things up for you…”
“Get to the point,” I snapped at her. She was no friend of mine, and she wasn’t doing me a solid. These preliminaries were pointless.
“Jennifer,” Neil interjected in a menacing tone, but she just raised her hand and tsk’d her index finger back and forth.
“I’m going to tell her either way, sweetheart. So let me talk.” She winked at him, and he took a deep breath, like he was trying to keep himself under control. Then he let that breath out, apparently surrendering to what was about to happen.
“Would you believe that your man isn’t the upstanding citizen he pretends to be?” Jennifer shot him a malicious look. “Three years ago, he started seeing Scarlett on the regular. At the same time, he continued to fuck me, Alexia, and anyone else he could get his paws on.” She gave me a humorless grin. “Then for some insane reason, he decided he was gonna take his little girlfriend on spring break with him. Can’t say why, though it for sure wasn’t to give her a Miami vacation. My guess? He wanted to introduce her to his real self.” She paused for effect and then went on. “We all stayed at a hotel near Crandon Beach for the week. Neil enjoyed the…festiveatmosphere just as much as the rest of us. He got high, he got drunk, he partied every night, and…” Jennifer advanced on me, shrinking the distance between us until the fruity smell of her perfume made my nose itch. “Honestly, I couldn’t tell you how many women he fucked in that one week,but I do know he’d regularly do it right in front of Scarlett just to show her how little she meant to him. Wait…that’s kind of like what he did to you, isn’t it?” she continued softly, staring deep into my eyes. Painful memories rose up in my mind of that Halloween party where Neil had done just that, using Jennifer specifically because he knew it would hurt me the most. But I swallowed down my feelings. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of watching me crumble right in front of her.
“One crazy night—one of many crazy nights that week—people started playing what they called the ‘Spring Break Games.’ You know, like the Olympic Games? Anyway, one of them involved kids jumping off the hotel balcony’s railing and landing in the pool…” she went on, and a disquieted feeling in my chest made me stagger back. I wanted to turn and look at Neil’s face, to gauge his expression, but my body refused to move.
“All messed up after a week of watching her boyfriend nail other girls right in front of her face, Scarlett got wasted and decided she was going to play too…”
I clapped a hand over my mouth to muffle a cry. Silence pressed in all around me; the only thing I could hear was the beating of my own heart.
“She jumped from the third story, and she made it into the pool, but she hit her head on impact. And Scarlett’s life was never the same after that. She was in the hospital for months, relearning how to walk and feed herself. She tried to come back to school even though her brain still wasn’t right. Unfortunately, everybody knew by then what she’d done and why she’d done it. A few assholes even filmed it with their phones, and the video was all over campus. People were assholes to her, making fun of her for throwing herself off a building for a guy who didn’t even love her. Scarlett, after all, was supposed to be a good girl. She was smart and responsible; she would never do something so crazy. And she wouldn’t have if Neil hadn’t been putting her through emotional torture for so long. He did everything he could to convince her that he didn’t want her; he showed her the worst parts of himself and told her she ought to get far away from him. But Scarlett was too deep in love, so Neil had to give her the coup de grâce. A few months after she tried to go back to school, Scarlett vanished without a trace. Just up and left her friends, her family, and even her dad,” Jennifer finished, shifting her gaze to Neil.
I was frozen, absorbing her words, which struck like lightning bolt after lightning bolt into my soul.
“Do you really believe he won’t do the same to you? Do you think he’s going to change for you? I guess you don’t know him as well as you thought you did,” she needled me with a sardonic smile.
I recoiled when I felt Neil’s hand lightly touch my shoulder. I sucked in a breath and stepped back.
“Don’t touch me,” I demanded, trying to push past him so I could get out of there.
“Selene…” He took me by the forearm and forced me to halt. Even the sorrow I saw in his face wasn’t enough to convince me to stay in that room.
“I begged her not to do it. Not to jump. She told me it was going to be her gesture of love for me, her way of showing me that she’d do anything for me. She wasn’t in her right mind. I…I…pleaded with her not to do anything stupid, but she was wasted and blind with jealousy and so goddamn angry that she wasn’t listening to me…” he murmured wretchedly.
His suffering eyes made my knees go weak. But I reminded myself that those eyes were also cursed and cruel with a dangerous capacity for doing harm. There was a darkness in them that would never fade. “It’s burned into my mind, that moment when she stepped up on that railing. She turned at the last second to look at me before she jumped. She was crying, and I tried… I tried to stop her, but…” He hung his head, his grip on me growing more possessive. “That was another reason I wanted to push you away from me. I didn’t want you to get dragged into my shit. I know better than anyone that I’ve made so many mistakes, just like I know I’m not the right person for you…” He looked down at his fingers, tightened around my arm, and slowly released me. My skin felt burned in the spot where his hand had been, and I automatically massaged the area with my other hand.
“I want to leave.” I raced toward the door, not caring that Jennifer and the rest of the Krew were watching me run away.
I waited impatiently for the elevator, and when the doors opened, I darted inside, only narrowly evading Neil, who was hot on my heels.
It was freezing when I walked out of the building, and I turned down a random sidewalk, fumbling for my phone so I could call a taxi.
The problem was, I didn’t know any numbers for a taxi service, and my new phone deliberately didn’t have any apps, so I couldn’t order a ride either.
“Motherfucker!” I blurted out. It wasn’t the kind of thing I usually said, but I was trying very hard not to cry, and anger seemed like the most effective way to hold back those tears.
“Selene…” After a few interminable moments, I heard Neil’s voice calling out from behind me. I just leaned over the curb, hoping to get lucky.
Now would be the perfect time for a taxi to just happen to be passing by so I could make my escape.
“I want to go back to Detroit,” I told him, still not turning around. I could hear his heavy breathing, a sure sign he’d had to run to catch up with me. Then he was grabbing my elbow and spinning me around until our eyes locked. Perhaps for the first time, I saw in those eyes a genuine fear of losing me. They were brilliant and so goddamned wounded that I couldn’t help but soften slightly.
“All of that is in the past,” he said. “I…”
“Are you going to hurt me like that the next time you want to push me away?” I asked challengingly, my lip trembling.
Damn, did I want to cry. Neil could sense what I was feeling, and he looked at me like he wanted to pull all the suffering from me and take it on himself. His voice dwindled into a plea, and the sound of it made me let go of all those tears I’d been holding back. “You don’t have to be afraid of me, not ever. Jennifer just wants to win. She’s jealous of you. You know it, and I know it. Don’t let her win.” He tried to stroke my cheek, but I jerked away from his touch. “I hate seeing you cry,” he said in a helpless murmur.
“I can’t look at you the same…” I tilted my face down, tears running down my chin as I tried to wipe them away with the back of my hand.
“Selene, I stripped away everything for you. I bared my body and my soul. You know everything there is to know about me. There are no more secrets. And I’ve always told you the truth. If I didn’t tell you everything about every time in my life, it was because even I was ashamed of it. I wanted to protect you from everything. Even from me…” He seized my face in his hands, and I went rigid. I was afraid he’d be able to sense the love I felt for him.
