Westside Series Box Set
By Monica Alexander
Copyright 2015 by Monica Alexander
ISBN: 978-1-3115-6380-4
Cover Image: (c) Monica Alexander
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or personals, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All Rights Reserved
No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.
The information in this book is distributed as an “as is” basis, without warranty. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor the publisher shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Thank you so much for purchasing the Westside Box Set that currently contains the first three books from the Westside Series, Lost in Wonderland, Lost Chances, and Lost to You. This series will eventually be comprised of four books, one for each member of the boy band, Westside. Lost in Wonderland is Cam’s story, Lost Chances is Van’s story, and Lost to You is Phillip’s story. In the next year, I’ll be adding Dillon’s story too. Happy reading!
Lost in Wonderland
Lost Chances
Lost to You
Lost in Wonderland
By Monica Alexander
Copyright 2015 by Monica Alexander
ISBN: 978-1-3108-1708-3
Cover Image: (c) Dmitrij Skorobogoatov / www.shutterstock.com Stock Photography
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or personals, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All Rights Reserved
No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.
The information in this book is distributed as an “as is” basis, without warranty. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor the publisher shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Chapter One
Andi
Slamming the front door behind me, I threw my bag down on the couch just inside our minuscule apartment, causing my best friend Hannah to look over at me like I was nuts. She was sitting on the opposite end of the couch reading a magazine with the TV on mute.
“What the hell happened to you?” she asked, taking in the snarl on my no doubt red face.
I didn’t respond exactly. I just sort of let out a groan/growl and stomped toward the refrigerator, my boots clomping on the worn hardwood floors. I yanked the door open, pulled a bottle of water from the fridge and took a long drink, all the while feeling Hannah’s eyes on me.
“And I repeat. What the hell happened to you?”
“David is an asshole,” I said, not looking at her.
My gaze was fixed on the doodle/note the aforementioned asshole had left next to my pillow a few days earlier when he’d left for work. I’d been sleeping over at his apartment, and it had made me smile when I woke up and saw it, so I stuck it on the fridge when I got home. I was an idiot.
Without thinking twice, I reached forward and closed my fingers around the piece of paper, scrunching it up into a ball, as my mind imagined it to be David’s head. Then I tossed it into the nearby trashcan.
“What did he do?” Hannah asked, but I didn’t answer her.
I walked over to my bag, fished out my phone, sat down, and proceeded to delete every picture we’d taken over the last two months while he’d cheesily but sweetly shown me everything amazing about New York in the fall – drinking hot chocolate in Central Park with leaves falling around us, apple picking upstate, stupid pumpkin carving for stupid Halloween, and trying every fall dish possible to ‘really get into the spirit of the season’. It was all bullshit. The past two months were a goddamn montage of a perfect lie.
Hannah was still watching me as I wiped my phone clean of any evidence that David had ever existed, leaving his contact information for last. My finger hovered over the button to delete it, to erase him completely, hesitating because I knew he’d call.
He’d said we weren’t finished talking, that he could explain, that he wanted me to understand things. Well I understood them alright. I understood that he had a wife and a son that he’d never told me about – and those weren’t exactly things I could ‘understand’ about a guy I was dating.
When I’d first seen them standing in line at William Sonoma, where ironically I’d been buying a birthday gift for David since he loved to cook, I’d done a double-take. Then I’d watched with dread in my stomach as he’d ruffled the boy’s hair and smiled at the woman. My eyes had narrowed as I realized what I was seeing, but in truth I hoped there was a rational explanation for who those people were – his sister and his nephew, his lesbian best friend and her son, hell, even his ex-wife and their son would have been preferable to the truth.
Then the woman kissed him, took the boy by the hand, and they left the store, leaving David in line to pay for their new pots and pans that I had no doubt were for the sprawling mansion they probably owned in Westchester County, because I knew he lived alone in his Tribeca loft. There was absolutely no evidence of a child or a woman there. It was a complete bachelor pad, which meant he was apparently leading a double life.
Since he was alone, I decided to confront him, but I did it as subtly as possible, sliding into line behind him, now having no plans to buy the potato ricer I held in my hand.
“Hello David,” I said coolly, my voice not sounding like my own.
He turned with a surprised look on his face, but he quickly covered it up with a smile. “Andrea,” he said, stepping toward me. I stepped back. “Sweetheart, how are you?”
I glared at him. He was the only person who called me by my full name. Everyone, including my family, had called me Andi my whole life. When I met David, he’d asked me what Andi was short for, and after I told him, he’d insisted on calling me Andrea. I’d let him, since hearing it roll off his tongue had been sensual and addicting, just like him. Now I felt like telling him to stop.
“Who is she?” I asked him, figuring it was probably better to get right to the point.
“Who’s who?” he questioned.
My eyes were practically slits at that point. “The woman you just kissed,” I said in a hushed whisper.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” he said around a chuckle. “I didn’t kiss anyone.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?!” I hissed, so badly wanting to lash out at him but also very aware that we were in public. “I saw you kiss her thirty seconds ago.”
“Well now that’s not factual,” he said s
moothly. “Thirty seconds ago I was looking into your beautiful brown eyes.”
Ten minutes earlier that line would have had me going all gooey inside and forgetting my own name. Now it just seemed forced and insincere, dirty even. He was mocking me. Condescending dick.
“Fine. Two minutes ago you kissed her, and I saw you. Who is she?” I growled in anger.
“Andrea, you’re making a scene,” he chastised me.
“My name’s Andi,” I snapped.
“Excuse me? Are you two in line?” a woman behind us asked.
We both turned to look at her. “Please go ahead,” David said with a smile.
He said it in that smooth, sexy way of his that made the woman smile and her cheeks flush. I wanted to roll my eyes and tell her not to believe his bullshit. He was a master flirter. Even mundane words could be twisted into something sensual with his mouth, but what I was slowly and painfully realizing was that his smooth words I’d so gullibly believed meant so much less than I ever thought they did.
David turned back to me. “Come over here with me, Andrea,” he said, taking my elbow in his hand as he stepped out of line and ignored my request to call me by nickname.
I yanked my arm out of his grip. “Don’t touch me.”
“Don’t be a child,” he said firmly, his tone suddenly changing.
I glared at him. I’d wondered if our age difference might become an issue at some point, and it seemed it had. Of course, if he was married, the fifteen years that separated us weren’t exactly going to be relevant. We had much bigger issues.
“Are you married?” I asked him once we’d stepped behind a display of cookbooks.
“Yes, I am,” he said, not beating around the bush.
I felt my eyebrows rise. “Just like that? You’re admitting it?”
“Well, I can’t exactly deny it, now can I? But I’m also asking you to hear me out.”
“Here you out? What’s there to hear?”
“Things are complicated. I love my wife, and I love my son, but I have strong feelings for you, Andrea,” he said, his hand sliding over my forearm. “I’m falling in love with you.”
I should have shaken his hand off, but he was looking at me in a way that had sucked me in from the time I’d met him. And he’d just told me he was falling for me. Dammit.
“How is that possible?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “How is anything possible? It just is.”
Alright. That was the snap back to reality I needed. He was using his philosophical double-talk that had worked on me too many times to count, but now was not the time to do that, and he should have realized it. I was looking for something concrete and real that would give me a glimmer of hope that we might still have a future – he loved his wife, but he wasn’t in love with her, he was hesitant to leave his son, he wanted to be with only me, but he had to figure out how to tell his family, etcetera. What I wasn’t looking for was a bullshit reason for him wanting his cake and eating it too. I wasn’t doing that. I wasn’t that naïve.
“Screw you,” I told him, yanking my hand away.
“Andrea, don’t do this,” he pleaded, but there was a hurried tone to his words as his gaze darted over my shoulder. I could guess who he was looking for and wondered if they’d returned.
I shook my head, fighting the tears that were brimming behind my eyes. Fortunately I was too angry to cry. “Get away from me, David. Go back to your family.”
He sighed. “I want to talk about this. Can I call you later?”
“No,” I snapped. “You’re married. Don’t call me again. In fact, lose my number.”
It broke my heart to say those words to him after everything I’d been feeling toward him just twenty minutes earlier when I’d been planning how to surprise him for his birthday. I’d been happy, floating a little, as I thought of how perfect things had been. I thought after years of dating the wrong guys that I’d finally found the right one. I’d been wrong again.
“I’ll call you later,” David insisted, his eyes shifting over my shoulder.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do this. I can’t.”
With that I turned and left, dropping the potato ricer on a display of Thanksgiving hostess gifts before I left the store. I shifted my gaze to the ground as I walked through the open door that was being held by none other than David’s wife. Tears sprang to my eyes as I caught a whiff of her perfume - Chanel No. 5. I recognized the scent. He’d given me the same bottle of perfume on a whim a few weeks earlier. I’d loved it at the time, but I was throwing it away as soon as I got home, knowing it would be a smell I would forever associate with betrayal.
Pulling my scarf tighter around my neck, I had one destination in mind and that was home. All my other shopping was forgotten, my day ruined, my mind a cluttered wreck littered with feelings of betrayal, hurt, anger, and bewilderment. I was almost in a daze as I walked across the city, pulling my coat tighter around me to ward off the cold November wind. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. I wanted to punch something.
I was hurt. That was at the heart of everything I was feeling. It wasn’t that I was in love with David. We’d only known each other a short time, but I liked everything about him – except the part where he was a cheating asshole. I’d invested in him. I’d invested in us, believing there was something there, that we had a future together. But we didn’t, and I felt like I’d been duped.
My anger had taken over again when I’d burst into my apartment, and it had built as Hannah had watched me with concern as I’d furiously deleted David from my life. I knew it was the only thing I could do. No way was I going to stay with him, no matter how much I liked him. I didn’t date cheaters. And with that thought in mind, I pressed my finger against my phone screen and deleted him completely.
“Andi, what happened?” Hannah asked again.
I looked up at her and sighed, forcing some of the anger I was feeling to leave. I knew at some point I would cry, but now wasn’t the time. Anger was winning the war of emotions I was feeling, and tears just weren’t a part of that.
I looked up at my best friend and decided to tell her everything. “David’s married,” I said, starting out with a bang.
* * *
A knock on my bedroom door woke me up from the nap I’d been enjoying, because in sleep I could forget that I’d broken up with David because he was a lying, cheating jerk. Fully awake, everything came back to me in a rush, and I felt empty all over again.
“Andi, can I come in?” Hannah asked.
“Sure,” I called back to her as I wiped the sleep from my eyes.
They felt puffy. I’d been crying before I’d fallen asleep. After downloading on Hannah for an hour, I’d finally broken down and cried, the weight of the day taking its toll. I hated that I was crying over David, but I couldn’t help it. I’d finally closed my eyes and lost myself to sleep that was more than welcome.
“How are you doing?” Hannah asked as she slipped into my tiny bedroom and sat on the edge of my bed.
David had never been to my apartment. We’d always hung out at his loft since it was so much bigger. He told me he’d done the post-collegiate apartment fifteen years earlier, and he wasn’t interested in reliving the experience. He told me I deserved more than six hundred square feet in an ugly pre-war building. I only wished my employer felt the same way as him, but I worked in PR, so I didn’t make much money in my semi-entry level role. In time – many, many years from now – I’d make more, but for now I was basically a peon.
Hannah was in the same boat working as an assistant in publishing. She and I would have loved to move to a bigger place, but it just wasn’t an option. We could barely afford the shoebox we had in Murray Hill as it was and had stayed there for the past three years since the landlord had only moderately raised the rent. We were hoping that would continue, or we’d both be out of luck.
“I’m doing okay,” I told Hannah who was looking at me with the same concern she’d
expressed after every other break-up we’d cried through.
They were always my break-ups, though, since Hannah didn’t date like I did. She had boyfriends, and she always seemed to have the upper hand. She’d never been dumped, and since we’d met freshman year of college, she’d been with three guys. She’d broken up with two of them and had been dating her current boyfriend, Henry, for a year. He was in law school at Rutgers, so they had a pseudo long distance relationship, which was beneficial for me. I had Hannah all to myself outside of every other weekend when they saw each other.
They were going to get married. I knew it, and Hannah knew it, but we also knew they were a long way off. Henry was only in his first year of law school, having gone back after working for a few years, so he probably wasn’t going to be making any life changes for a while.
“You sure you’re okay?”
I shrugged as I sat up in bed, running my fingers through my long brown hair. “This sucks. I thought he was the one.”
Hannah gave me a sympathetic smile, but I could tell there was something behind it – something she wasn’t telling me. We’d been friends for too long for me not to know her looks.
“What is it?”
“What’s what?” she asked innocently.
I narrowed my eyes. “Han, come on. I know you better than that. You’re giving me the same look you gave me when I told you I wanted to cut my hair and dye it red last year, and it’s also the same look you gave me when I told you I wanted to change my major to philosophy sophomore year. What major life lesson am I not seeing here?”
I forced a smile despite my complete lack of feeling any joy.
“Well,” Hannah started, “it’s just, you fall in love a lot, Andi. And not that there’s anything wrong with that, but you sort of think every guy’s ‘the one’.”
Westside Series Box Set Page 1