by Claire Adams
She was no longer a taken woman. She was already showing signs of wanting more. Fuck, she’d come right out and said it.
I want to see where things go between us. I don’t know how I’d missed that miserable little tidbit, but I chalked it up to the heat of the moment.
Juliana wanted something more than one night; she wanted a relationship. And that was something I couldn’t abide. The one thing I couldn’t give her.
A revenge, rebound fuck and couple of orgasms: hell yeah, I was her guy. A shoulder to cry on and someone to brush her teeth with in the mornings, listen to her triumphs and losses and whatever: I wasn’t that guy. Not anymore.
I couldn’t believe that I’d been distracted enough to miss that point. She really did do something to me, that fucking girl. Hitting the start button on the dishwasher when I reached the kitchen, I grabbed another beer from the fridge and sank down into a chair at the beat-up table in a daze.
How the hell had I let things go so far that she’d ventured into relationship territory? I was a master at the game, so why was I so far off it?
I didn’t ever even let myself think about relationships, because it felt like a betrayal to May’s memory, and suddenly I was on the road to ‘let’s see where it goes?’
No. Nope. Couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t do it.
Juliana had broken up with her boyfriend yesterday, for Christ’s sake. I’d known that he was an asshole, of course, but had he been so much of an asshole that she could possibly already be interested in anything more than rebound sex?
Clearly.
I felt like a dick for leading her on, but I would have to let her down gently. Tell her that the only place I could go with her was to bed and take it from there. I didn’t even know if I should do that much. I’d agreed to call her, though I had no idea why I’d done that, either.
I didn’t do calls. I never called. Not even slightly drunken booty calls, because on the rare occasion that I did repeat performances, it was when I ran into some girl at a bar and let my cock lead the way.
Fuck. I ran my hands through my hair again. And again. Blinking stupidly into the kitchen light that hung above my head. Juliana seemed like a good person, and I liked her. I didn’t want to hurt her, and I’d inadvertently gotten myself into a position where I would likely have to.
Get over yourself, asshole! You’re not all that.
No. I wouldn’t hurt her. We’d kissed twice. That was it. That was all there was to it; I wasn’t in a position to hurt her.
I should’ve thanked her, actually. Her walking out had kept me from making a mistake of epic proportions, because if I’d fucked her while she thought there was a chance at a relationship, that would’ve hurt her.
A part of my mind was wondering why there wasn’t a chance at a relationship, but I shut that shit down almost before the thought had the opportunity to fully form. Sure, I bagged a lot of women, but I only had one girl.
And that was May.
I never opened my heart to any of the women I slept with because it belonged to May. Always had, always would. It had to.
Why?
The question plagued me as I drained my beer and switched off lights on my way to my bedroom. I took another shower to clear my head, but unfortunately, I didn’t own any soap that could scrub my brain.
Flashing briefly on the tequila in my fridge, I decided against it. Getting fucked up wasn’t the answer.
I collapsed into my bed, naked since I hadn’t bothered putting anything on after my shower. My thoughts were still in a maelstrom, and it didn’t show any signs of letting up. Questions were racing through my mind, and I had no answers.
Not a one.
Folding my arms behind my head, I stared up at my ceiling in the darkness, only a sliver of moonlight lighting up the room in a pale glow. I considered jerking off since it was a surefire way to clear my head, if only for a few blissful minutes, but as hard and horny as I’d been earlier, I wasn’t feeling it now.
In a word, I was fucked. My mind was warring, and when I finally drifted off into fitful bursts of sleep, Juliana and May battled it out for starring in my dreams. They shouldn’t have been, and I knew it; the only person who had a place there was May, but then why was I feeling like shit about Juliana every time that I jerked awake?
I had no explanation for that, not at first, anyway. In the early hours of the morning, when the darkness allowed me to be honest with myself, I realized that it was because Juliana felt great in my arms.
She fit against me like a damn puzzle piece. She was taller than May, and curvier, slotting into my body like she’d been made to be there, but even the thought made me feel like a traitorous cheating bastard.
Or made part of me feel like a traitorous, cheating bastard. It was the part that advocated loyalty to the paragon that was my late girlfriend, but the other part was driving me to connect with the sexy blonde that wouldn’t let go of her hold on my thoughts.
She felt too damn good in my arms to stop thinking about her, or to let her go and walk away just like she had, but May was always there in the back of my mind. The way she would argue with me over which was the best weapon we had in our arsenal, the light in her eyes when we prepared for deployment, and her excitement over our missions. It was all there, and I owed it to her to hang onto all of it.
When the first light of dawn started kissing the treetops beyond my bedroom window, I realized that another night had gone by without my getting enough sleep.
Fuck my life. I could only hope that my coffee kicked in before my reality did.
Chapter 18
Juliana
I was on day three of my self-imposed social exile and was starting to feel a touch of cabin fever. Being alone with my thoughts was starting to become a drag, especially since I wasn’t exactly in a happy place.
It had taken me some time, but I’d finally discovered and admitted to myself that I was pretty damn pissed off. I was pissed off with Amber for fucking me over, and with Scott for doing the same. I’d given him a place to stay, put food on the table, and given him a bed to sleep in, but it wasn’t my bed that he wanted to be in.
Apparently.
I felt humiliated, used, and betrayed, but if I was honest with myself and really dug deep, I realized that it didn’t have all that much to do with Scott’s behavior.
That realization had led me to the conclusion that the person I was most upset with was Pacey. He’d said he would call after our near-perfect night together and he hadn’t.
Why the hell hadn’t he called?
Was there no one I could trust? When he told me he would call, I’d believed him because of that stupid implicit trust that I’d placed in him, mistakenly, apparently.
His distance was wreaking havoc on my self-esteem. I’d thought everything had gone so well between us, but if that was true, he would’ve called. And he hadn’t.
First, I hadn’t been enough for Scott, and now, I wasn’t even worth picking up the phone for. It sucked. I hated feeling this way, and this was the third evening I was spending in, moping about it on my couch having ice cream for dinner and generally wondering where I’d gone wrong in life.
I knew that it was useless to tuck myself under a blanket, stare blankly at my TV, and feel sorry for myself, but I couldn’t help it. I hadn’t spoken to anyone in days, though I received texts from a ton of my friends commiserating with me for breaking up with Scott and telling me that they would give me my space, but that they were there when I was ready to talk.
So space I had. Plenty of it. Space had become my best friend, though it could only be a better one than the former had been. Miserable as I might have been about it.
All the lights in my house were off, except for the one in the living room where space, Ben, Jerry, and I were curled up on the couch. I’d taken to sleeping there, in front of the television so I wouldn’t feel alone.
I was a pathetic mess, which was probably why Pacey hadn’t called. He’d probably somehow known ex
actly what I was, what with his awesome deductive reasoning skills.
A soft knock sounded from my front door, and my heart skipped a beat. Could it be that Pacey finally decided to crawl out of whatever hole he’d disappeared into after our date on Sunday?
Glancing down at my light summer pajamas, adorned with Batman logos on the pants and the bat signal on my shirt, I decided that he would just have to deal with it. He’d been a key part of creating the disaster that I looked like, so it was only fair that he be faced by it. If it was him, of course.
I ran my fingers through my hair after I hopped off the couch, easing out a knot that had formed from lying with my head on the pillow for so long, and headed for the door. I didn’t have a peephole, so couldn’t have known who was waiting on the other side, but I flung the door open with a speech prepared about how the supposed wait-three-days-before-calling rule was bullshit.
Then I nearly slammed it again when I saw who it was that was waiting for me. Amber stepped forward at the last second and put her palm to the door.
“Please, don’t. Just hear me out. Please give me a chance to explain,” she begged, round eyes shining with desperation.
I stared at her, “Do you honestly think you could explain away the fact that you were fucking my boyfriend behind my back?”
“It wasn’t like that, Juliana, please. You don’t have to say anything if you’ll just listen. Five minutes, that’s all I’m asking for. Please give me five minutes.”
Whether it was my lack of human interaction outside of work this week, or the look on her face, I didn’t know, but I stepped back, threw on the light in the entrance hall, and allowed her in.
“Thank you,” she breathed, fidgeting with her hands.
“You have five minutes, and I’m not inviting you to sit down or offering you anything,” I told her, crossing my arms over my chest.
“Fair enough,” she said, sucking in a deep breath. “I’m so, so sorry Juliana, I—”
“If you’re only here to say sorry, then save it. Sorry doesn’t change what you did. You asked for five minutes to explain; don’t waste it on sorry.”
“Okay. Look—urg! This is so much harder than I thought it would be.” She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, then dropped them and continued. “Scott and I had an affair, that’s true, but I swear I didn’t do it to hurt you, Jules.”
I let out a peal of incredulous laughter and raised a brow at her. “You didn’t think it would hurt me?”
“No,” she blew out a breath. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just that it didn’t start like that, with some malicious intent on my part to hurt you.”
“So what? You just started sleeping with my boyfriend because you couldn’t keep your hands off him?”
Amber shook her head, then shocked me to the core. “Scott has been selling me drugs for a couple of months now.”
My jaw dropped, and my eyes shot wide open, both metaphorically and literally. That explained so much: Scott’s erratic behavior, the unsavory friends, and the late nights. It still surprised the hell out of me, though. Not only was my ex a drug dealer, but my best friend was an addict, and I hadn’t known.
“How did this happen?” I asked her, searching my mind for signs of Amber’s addiction over the last few months.
“I was so stupid, Jules. People warn you about this stuff and you just never think it’s going to happen to you, you know?”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t know. Enlighten me. How did you get involved with that scene?”
Amber hadn’t even so much as smoked in high school, she didn’t drink more than any of the rest of us, and she was honestly the last person I would’ve imagined getting involved with drugs.
“I decided to try it on a whim one night. I was out with Scott, you’d gone home. He offered me some cocaine, and I took it.”
“Oh, Amber, coke? Really?” I groaned, unable to believe what she was telling me, but riveted to the story even though I was sure her five minutes were up.
“It started out as only that one night, but I had so much fun after I took it that I went back for more. Scott was just glad to have a friend to get high with, and a couple of weeks later we got high together and the next thing I knew, things just—happened, I guess.”
“How did you go from things just happening when you were high to texting him that you loved him?” It would’ve sucked even it was just that once, but it’d clearly been more than that.
Amber had the good grace to look embarrassed, ringing her hands while her cheeks went pink. “I liked getting the attention from Scott.”
“What?”
“It’s just, and please don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not trying to blame you or anything, I swear, but you’ve always had it so easy with men.”
What other possible way was there to take it? “Are you kidding me?”
“No, I—God, Jules. I know how it sounds, but I can’t think of any other way to say it. Guys are always practically throwing themselves at you.”
I scoffed, rolled my eyes, and tightened my arms around my chest, but let her continue because she was my oldest friend and I knew she had trouble expressing herself sometimes. Or at least, she had been my oldest friend. She didn’t exactly qualify as a friend at the moment.
She looked at me with pleading eyes again, begging me to understand. I didn’t. “For me, it’s not that easy. You’ve seen the guys I’ve dated. They haven’t been anything special; hell, they were average at best. A guy as hot as Scott paying attention to me? I couldn’t resist, even though I knew that it was wrong.”
“You think?”
“I just never thought a guy who looked like him could be attracted to me, so when he was—it was so flattering, and I got carried away, I guess. Between the thrill of the high and being with him, I got lost in it, and I got attached, I can admit that. I’m so sorry, Juliana. I know that Scott was—”
I cut her off before she could keep prattling on about Scott. Amber wasn’t in my good books at the moment, sure, but she’d been my best friend for a long time, and I was more worried about her than I was Scott.
“Enough about him for right now. What about you? What’re you going to do about your nasty little habit? Surely, I don’t need to tell you that you’ve got to stop with that shit, right?”
“No, you don’t. After everything that happened, I’m off the hard stuff. Forever. I promise.”
“After everything that happened? It’s been like, four days since I found out; how can you promise that it’ll be forever?” I didn’t know much about drugs, especially not the hard stuff, but even I knew that quitting couldn’t be as easy as all that.
“I know, but I haven’t used since last Thursday night, so it’ll be a week tomorrow,” she said, and for the first time, I noticed that she was trembling slightly.
“Are you okay?” I was angry with her, more than angry really, but I cared about her, and she didn’t look like she was okay.
“I will be,” she said, confidently. “I know that it’s not going to be easy, but I’m done. I swear. I can’t stand the thought that I’ve done this to us. I can’t believe that it’s my fault that my best friend in the whole world won’t take my calls or read my texts, it made me realize how far off the deep end I’ve gone. Will you ever be able to forgive me? Can we come back from this?”
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” I honestly didn’t know. I wanted to forgive her; Amber knew me like no one else did, and I wanted to support her because she was probably right that it wasn’t an easy time ahead of her, but I just couldn’t promise anything.
“I need time, Amber. I need to think. This is the second bomb that’s exploded on me within four days, and I need time to process. I want to, I just—I don’t know what to tell you right now.”
Amber winced, but she nodded. “I understand. I know that what I did was awful, but I swear I’ll never do anything like it ever again. I’ll spend the rest of my life making this up to y
ou, if you’ll just find it in your heart to let me.”
I sighed, her plea tugging at my heartstrings, but I couldn’t look at her without feeling the knife stabbing into my back. “I’m going to try, but it’s not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, I think you need to consider going to rehab, or getting counseling at the very least.”
“I will, promise.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” Amber repeated, then said her goodbyes. “Thanks for hearing me out, Jules. You didn’t deserve any of this, and I really am sorry.”
Chapter 19
Pacey
The past week had sucked balls. Donkey-sized balls that had been jammed right down my throat. It utterly, completely sucked. Not only did I feel guilty for betraying May’s memory with my near-constant thoughts of Juliana, but I was still so off my game that I hadn’t even bothered to talk to other women all week.
Five days felt a lot longer than it sounded when I thought about it only being five days. Five long, God-awful days in which I alternated between my skin being on too tight and feeling freer and more alive than I had in years.
In those free times, the colors around me seemed brighter, and the world seemed to be buzzing with possibility, then I would remember that there would never be any possibilities for May ever again, that her future—and, by association, mine—had been ripped away from us, and the choking feeling came back in full force.
It was a maddening, cruel cycle that I couldn’t seem to rip myself out of.
“Fucking, fuck!” I cursed at the hedge I was trimming, then started whacking at it haphazardly when I got stuck in this weird limbo where the colors were brighter, and my skin was too tight all at the same time.
I didn’t even see Tugger coming toward me before he was taking the tool out of my hands, saving the poor hedge from total annihilation. It snapped me out of my trance-like limbo, and I was instantly grateful that Tug had saved me destroying our client’s plants.