So I lie.
“We’re barely not enemies,” I start, reining in my emotions and putting that shit on lockdown. “I still don’t know what to think about the scholarship. About everything. You lied to me by not telling me that you were applying for it. We were really good friends and you kept everything you were going through a secret. You didn’t trust me with any of it. You’re part of the reason that I blamed you and called you a thief and a cheat and a liar for the past decade.”
“I’m not saying you’re the only one at fault.” Karsyn blinks, way too calm.
“Why didn’t you tell me about what was happening to your mom? We could have helped you. My family. I-I know we didn’t have money or the connections your family did, but you didn’t have to do it all alone.”
“If I’d have said anything, my dad would have gone after my mom so bad he might have put her in the hospital. He would have thought she did it. He was a bully, not just a drunk. Fear. That’s what ruled our household. For years. I don’t know how long he was doing it before he finally just stopped giving a shit that I saw. I guess he figured I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut.”
“I wouldn’t have told anyone. My parents wouldn’t have either. We would have protected you and your mom. We would have helped her find someone who could.”
“I was a kid back then. I had enough shit to worry about. I can’t look back now and try to rehash what I did and didn’t do. My mom got us out of there. That was that. We would have been homeless if her parents hadn’t taken us in. I had a few months to try to salvage shit. I never meant for you to leave. I wanted to help. Any way I could.”
“Don’t feel guilty.” I make sure that mask has zero cracks, even though I’m aching inside. “You did enough now. Although you shouldn’t have done it. You can’t buy my forgiveness and you can’t buy me.”
“I’m not trying to buy you!” Karsyn throws his hands up in the air. “What is wrong with you? I shouldn’t have to buy your forgiveness either. We were friends. I didn’t have to tell you anything about what was going on, even now. That shit is private. I didn’t steal that scholarship from you. It was earned. I am a good writer. Always was. It was the only thing I was ever really good at. Why do you think you gave me all your shit to read over in the first place? I didn’t steal your damn essay. I didn’t take anything from you. You were the one who refused to listen and went off to North Carolina half cocked. That wasn’t me. That one is all the way on you. You left your friends, your family—”
“Yeah. You’ve already said that,” I hiss. I can’t stand here and take this. I can’t stay composed. I can’t think about all my shortcomings and failings and how I might have been so wrong and how much I might hate myself for throwing away everything he just said.
For weeks, months, years I’d struggled through the bitter pall of loneliness. I made it on my own because I felt like I had to. I had something to prove, but really, it was only to myself. I’d kept myself in ten years of self-imposed exile. He’s right. I didn’t listen. Not to him. Not to my friends. Not to my family. I barely even let them say Karsyn’s name.
I tried so freaking hard to get over him. For a decade.
Now I’m back and I realize that all the work I did to move on and forget was pretty much for nothing, because with one kiss, he shot it all to shit, even before I knew the truth.
Now I have something else to worry about besides hatred and walls and keeping him at arm’s length. I’ve let him close. Twice. Two kisses might not mean a lot to anyone else, but this is Karsyn and they are his kisses. Kisses I’ve literally dreamed about for pretty much half my life, wrong and pathetic as that might be, so I can’t just get over them. It is my heart on the line.
“We can’t do this!” I plant my hands on my hips. “This isn’t high school and I’m not interested in a one-night stand. I don’t want a relationship either and I have enough friends. I might not hate you, but there isn’t any room in my life for you.”
“That so?” Karsyn’s eyes turn stormy, just like the ocean right in front of us must look before it churns and swells with the wind and the rain.
“Yes!” I grab up my tote bag and lunge for my sweater, intent on rounding the bed and getting back into someone’s line of sight so that I’m not alone with Karsyn and my own traitorous heart.
Because he’s Karsyn, he knows my game plan before I do. He snags me around the waist and takes me down hard to the sand before I can even get to my sweater. Of course, because he’s Karsyn, he also breaks my fall. My bag goes flying and I land right on top of him as his back hits the sand. The air rushes out of his lungs, but I barely feel a thing.
Other than rage.
I shove at him, coming up blazing, spitting, fiery, and feisty. “What do you think you’re doing? It’s not bad enough that you all already wrecked each other over some stupid bro fight in the limo, now you have to try to take me down with a football tackle? What the hell is wrong with you?”
Karsyn’s arm curls around my waist a little tighter. I didn’t even realize fully that it was there. His other hand shoots out and grabs the back of my neck. His hand is so hot, scalding, perfect, wonderful. I want to hate it. I want to hate him. I want to kick sand in his face and tell him to go to hell, but instead I let him drag my face to his.
His mouth crashes over mine, his lips scalding, hot, brutalizing mine. He kisses me breathless, bruising my lips with the force of it. He kisses me like he wants to make up for all that lost time in the span of a single minute.
I can’t fight him. I’m completely powerless. When I make a half-hearted attempt to push him away, he grabs me and rolls me all the way on top of him, so that I’m straddling his waist and my dress is rucked up past the point of decency. It should matter to me that we’re in the middle of a very public beach. That anyone could come across us at any time.
It should, but my hands are suddenly fumbling at his neck, tearing at his stupid red tie, red to match my dress. I want that thing off. I want the buttons undone. I want his skin underneath my fingers. My nails marking him, my lips, my tongue, my teeth, all marking him as mine.
“I’m sorry,” he pants as he breaks away. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
I smother his mouth with mine, drinking in his pain. I kiss him until it physically hurts to keep doing it, until the skin around my mouth feels raw from the slight amount of stubble that I can barely even see on his granite jawline.
“I’m sorry that you spent all these years hating me.”
Something stings the backs of my eyes as I look down at Karsyn, pressed into the sand below me, his face a mask of pain and shame and hurt. It’s all mixed up with the longing and something far worse. Something naked in his eyes. Lust, yes. Desire, hell yes. I’m straddling his waist and even though I’m pressed up a little ways above him, since I refuse to be a total wonton while we’re in public, I can feel his arousal. He’s huge and alive and very, very male below me. His scent swirls all around me, dark and thick and heady, mingling with the salty tang of the ocean and the softer, crisper scent of fresh air and sand.
I can’t bear to see the emotion burning in his cobalt orbs. I want to be wrong. I want to believe that we were just friends in high school and I was the only one with a crush. It was so much easier believing that he was an asshole, a douchebag to the extreme. That he’d wronged me. That he was a thief and a liar and a bad person all around.
It was so much easier to hate him, because if I didn’t hate him, I’d feel the opposite and I’d be the one who spent a decade of my life pining for someone who didn’t exist. Someone who had moved on. I’d be the pathetic one that hadn’t. I’d be the one stuck in a rut. The one who, no matter how many times they went on dates or tried to be normal, just couldn’t be because there was always that piece missing and no one else was going to fit perfectly. They might fit, but it would be like jamming the wrong piece into place.
“I wish it had been you,” I blurt. I want to snatch the words back. I want to stea
l them back, because the burning in his eyes dials up a horrible notch. The burning in mine intensifies tenfold and before I know what’s happening, it’s raining all over Karsyn’s face.
I actually look up at the sky, confused, before I realize the rain is coming from me. That burning at the backs of my eyes, stinging my nose and clogging up my throat, is tears. I’m crying.
“It should have been you!” I slam a hand onto Karsyn’s massive, rock hard chest as he reaches up and grips my shoulders to steady me.
“I know,” he soothes. “I know. It should have been you too. We wasted so much time. Me. You. We were both wrong, but we’re here now. We’re here and—”
“No.” I shake my head wildly. Way too wildly, because I feel pins loosen and clatter to the sand around us. Curls start springing free all over the place. “No. We’re not…this isn’t…I just can’t.”
I rip free of Karsyn’s hold and obviously he lets me, because I’d never be able to get away otherwise. I don’t know where I’m going. I just get to my feet and take off. I forget about my tote and my sweater and everything. I just have to get away.
It’s not easy, nearly blinded by tears. I have enough sense to realize that on the other side of the beach, Jake and Arla are doing their photos and their family stuff. I can’t go that way, so I head up to the treeline and parking lot beyond.
I don’t stop, even though I’m barefoot and that shit isn’t as soft as the sandy beach was. I barely feel a thing. I just keep going, running, my face a mess of tears and snot and probably smeared lipstick and sand, fear and self-loathing and regret.
I keep going, running, everything a blur, until I nearly ram headfirst into a solid wood door. I glance up in shock and find myself right where I was last night when everything started going to shit. At the stupid restaurant overlooking the beach.
I don’t think. I plunge straight in.
It’s early, but not that early. There are people eating in there and I push past a startled hostess, who has the sense not to stop me as I cut a line right to the back where I know the bathrooms are.
I stumble right past the spot Karsyn kissed me the night before, and that just makes me hate myself that much more. Why was I so stupid? I wasted so much time. I gave all my firsts to someone I didn’t love. To someone who didn’t mean a thing. I tried so hard to make it work. I thought I was defunct. All because I just couldn’t listen. I was so afraid to open my heart. To think. To feel. It hurts so fucking badly that I feel like I’m going to die. I half wish the world would open a big sinkhole and swallow me up and just get it over with before I can cause any more damage. To myself. To Karsyn. To anyone.
If it hurts this much right now, how much more will it hurt if I let him close? I can’t take the chance. I can’t do this to us. We obviously were never meant to be. I can’t defy the laws of nature. Karma is a hard, cold bitch and it will get me in the end. It will make me pay for making an innocent man pay for something he didn’t do for a decade.
I head right to the sink, crank the cold water, and, heedless of my expensive makeup, splash cold water all over my face. I feel sick. My stomach roils and I have to grip the edge of the sink to stay upright.
The bathroom door creaks open and I whirl, ready to tell someone to give me three more seconds to die in private and another minute to get myself collected enough to walk out of there after. I blink through the moisture pouring out of my eyes, the tears and the water, and an image slowly swims into view.
It’s not female.
It’s very, very male.
My tote hits the tiled floor and the bathroom lock hisses into place on the main door, effectively locking out the rest of the world.
And locking us in.
Chapter 10
Karsyn
“I know you’re scared. You’re running because you’re terrified and you’re upset. If you think I’m not, think again. I’m all of those things, but I’m not running away from us. I had this one chance to get you to listen. You did. I’m not nearly done with you yet. I’m not finished. I’m not giving up on us. We are not done. We haven’t even started yet.”
It’s a big speech to give to someone who is shaking, whose face is a wreck of tears and snot and water. Whose hair is in a wild disarray. In short, someone who looks like they just had the epic emotional meltdown of the year about an hour before they’re due to walk down the aisle as another someone’s maid of honor.
It’s too big, but I put it out there anyway. I’ll probably never get another chance, and I’m not backing down. I’m so far from being done and admitting defeat.
I step forward. Tears, snot—that’s not going to deter me. The only thing that is going to chase me out of this bathroom is either a security squadron breaking down the door and dragging me away, or if Breona tells me to go fuck myself.
She points to the door. Her lips open. Close. Open. No words come out. Her hand slowly drops down to her side and her shoulders drop in defeat right before they start to shake. She covers her face in her hands. It’s clear the meltdown isn’t over yet.
I don’t care. She can meltdown all that she needs to. She can break and boil over and ruin and I’ll be right there, just like I always wanted to be, to put everything back together, but this time, it’s getting assembled back into the way it always should have been.
It occurs to me, right around the time I wrap her up in my arms and haul her, sobbing, against my tux, that maybe this is the way it always was meant to be.
We’re twenty-eight. We have our entire lives ahead of us. The past is just a small blip on the radar.
I know she can’t read my mind, so I soothe back more than a few soaking wet curls from her forehead and set her back a pace. I wipe at her tear laden cheeks with my bare hands, leaving sandy, dusty streaks. Breona’s a mess, but she’s the most beautiful mess I’ve ever seen. She is, was, and will always be my mess.
“All that stuff is over now,” I soothe her. “It’s done. Bree, we wasted so much time. That hurts. I get that. It makes me want to slam my fist into that tile wall, and the only thing stopping me from doing it is the fact that I’d break every single bone in my hand and I can’t wind up in the ER right before Jake’s wedding because that would make me the world’s worst best man and I’m already perilously close to that title as is.”
Breona’s eyes go wide with panic. She whirls to stare at herself in the huge mirror with the ornate gold frame. She lets out a horrified gasp, like it just occurred to her that she’s ruined her hair and makeup.
I take her face between my palms again and force her to look away. “No. That doesn’t matter. Arla would take you as you are any day. She loves you. Everyone does. We all do. We’re you’re friends. We’ll always be here for you. We always have been, even when you weren’t here. I need you to hear me, Bree. Please.”
“O-okay,” she stammer-sobs. Her hands curl around my palms and her swollen, red rimmed eyes meet mine.
“We’ve wasted a lot of time. But we don’t have to keep doing that. We can start over. Start fresh.”
She stares at me, so damn sad that it breaks my heart all over again. I literally feel like my guts have been torn apart and they’re leaking all over on the inside. It feels fucking terrible. Like I’m dying slowly.
“I-I can’t…I can’t promise that,” she sobs out. “I…we…it’s too soon, Karsyn. We have a wedding… I’m a mess. I c-can’t go looking like this.”
“It’s okay,” I relent, still soothing her. “It’s okay. Just come here.” I guide her over to the sink. I wish I could put my fist through that mirror that she keeps looking at with the utmost horror. “It’s okay. I’ll help.”
“How would you know how to do makeup?” Breona hiccups. She bends and splashes more water on her face, trying to take the swelling out of her puffy cheeks and eyes.
“I might know a thing or two,” I boast, all false bravado and she knows it.
When she comes up, wiping at her face with an actual towel that the restaurant
supplies because it’s so fucking five star it’s sickening, she actually has the smallest hint of a smile.
“Never. You’d make me look like a clown.”
I have enough sense to realize that’s true. Instead, I beat a fast path over to her tote and drag the damn thing, which is as heavy as a lead weight, over to the sink.
“That might be true. I’ll leave the makeup to you. What I am good at is hair.”
“No, you’re not,” she gulps. Thank god she’s reaching into the tote and sorting out little packets of makeup all over the sink.
“I don’t know about that.” I reach for a series of pins and let loose, letting her gorgeous, springy curls fly all over the place.
I don’t stop until I’m done and then I do what I’ve longed to do for fourteen fucking years. I run my fingers through those curls. They are soft. Gorgeous. Feathery, but springy too. I don’t know how something that looks so wiry and springy and unruly can actually be so, so soft. The scent is like stepping into the chambers of the divine and finding a host of angels bathing in gold dust.
The Mistletoe Wedding Page 7