I turn to leave.
"Believe me, girl, I’m worth it," the woman says to my back.
I stop. I turn back slowly, and I cross the room. I take a fistful of her hair and pull her head back until she's looking up at me from an angle that can't be comfortable, but I don’t care. I look into her eyes, letting the hurt fuel the rage I can feel blazing from my eyes.
"Don't think he'll keep you around," I say quietly. "He clearly wants to fuck everything that moves."
I hold her eyes for another second before I spit in her face. I let her go and walk out of the room, pulling the door shut behind me with enough force to make the frame rattle.
The walk through the clubhouse is the longest I've ever taken. I keep my spine straight and my chin. I look at nothing and no one as I tell myself one more step. One more step, just get to the door. A man speaks as I pass but I don't hear the words, only the tone of it, half mocking, half curious. I keep walking.
The door. The compound. The car park. My car.
I sit in the driver's seat and grip the steering wheel with both hands and then the first sob tears itself out of me. My shoulders come up around my ears and I cry in great ugly gulps that hurt my chest. The outside of the clubhouse is exactly the same as it was twenty minutes ago. The bikes are still lined up, the painted letters are still weathering on the wall, and none of it knows or cares what just happened to me inside it.
I trusted him. For four years, I trusted him completely. I thought he was the one person in the world who would never do this to me. I thought we were different from other couples, that what we had was something you didn't throw away for a blonde woman on a Tuesday afternoon. I thought he loved me.
Maybe he did. Maybe that's the worst part.
I sit there until the crying stops and then I wipe my face on the back of my hand, before I start the car to drive home. When I get to my bedroom, I get into bed and I sob my heart out all over again.
The next morning, I call the university housing office and ask if I can move in a week early. I’m relieved when they say yes.
I tell my parents I need to find a job before the other students arrive and flood the market. It's not entirely a lie. But mostly I need to get out of this town before I do something I can't undo. Or worse, before I knock on Austin's door and beg him to explain it in a way that makes it make sense, because I know myself well enough to know that's the real danger.
I pack in two hours. I don't look at my phone to check for messages.
I leave before I can change my mind.
CHAPTER 1
Austin
Ihate the look in her eyes. I hold it in my head, and I let it hurt because I need to remember this. I need to keep it somewhere I can reach it, because the next time I start to think I made a mistake I'm going to pull out the memory of Savannah's face in that doorway and I'm going to let it remind me why I did it.
She needs to go. She needs to go and become the doctor she's always talked about being, the life she's had planned since she was a kid. The life she's worked for all through school while I coasted on charm, a mechanical aptitude and a vague idea that I'd figure it out eventually. She has a scholarship. She has a future that's bigger than this town and bigger than me. If I'd just said goodbye like a normal person she’d have spent the next four years looking over her shoulder at what she left behind instead of looking forward at what she was building.
She needed to hate me. So, I gave her something to hate me for.
As soon as Savannah leaves, Raven starts a tirade. She's still on top of me and she's pulled herself upright and she's talking about Savannah in a way that makes the back of my neck go hot witha feeling I don't want to examine. "She's a fucking bitch. She doesn't deserve you, Austin."
"Shut the fuck up and finish the job, Raven. I need a drink."
I don't know why I didn't just pull her off me. I don't want to be here. I haven't wanted to be here since the second Sav walked through that door. But I'm so close now and there's something almost punishing about finishing it, like I deserve to feel this hollow. It doesn't take long. When it's done, I want her out of my sight.
She climbs off me and starts dressing and tries to run her hand along my jaw and I lean my head back away from her touch.
"Get out," I say.
She goes, but not without looking back at me from the doorway with an expression I don't have the energy to deal with right now.
I sit on the edge of the bed in the quiet of my room, and I stare at the wall. I breathe through it. The pain in my chest is a specific kind of pain, the kind that comes from doing something on purpose that you knew was going to wreck you. I chose this. I have to keep choosing it. I have to get up off this bed and go downstairs and be the man I said I was going to be.
I get up.
The main room goes quiet in that particular way rooms go quiet when they've been watching a major fuck up take place and now the person involved has walked in. Three or four of the men are looking at me while trying not to look like they're looking at me. I straighten my back and meet their eyes one by one until they go back to what they were doing.
"What the fuck are you all looking at?"
