“So it’s fair game to hook up with him once I’m gone?”
She capitalized on the vulnerability that showed in his voice.
“Were you…did you want us to continue long-distance?” Aghast, realization slowly dawned on her. “I had no idea you were thinking that way.”
Jamie swallowed his words.
Of course she had no idea. She had no idea how much he loved her. And she’d never know now.
They’d promised to be together until January. That was the explicit agreement. He’d never indicated that he wanted to stay longer or that he’d be able to. He’d only silently hoped that she’d have fallen in love with him and want to continue being with him. He hadn’t counted on her going back to her ex.
“I wasn’t thinking of long-distance.” Jamie felt Bryan’s questioning gaze on him and he couldn’t say any more here. “I don’t believe that long-distance relationships work very long.”
It wasn’t fair to hold it against Bella. She’d never promised more than this. But he so violently wanted them to be more than a simple, three-month fling. He’d changed jobs and moved to a new city, banking on it.
Maybe he should’ve asked her first.
Maybe he could ask her now.
“So it’s okay for me to have her, right?” Bryan said.
“Can I talk to you?” He didn’t bother gracing Bryan with any cold glares. “Alone.”
“Can’t you come by later?” Bryan butted in, with one of those annoyed-superstar looks pasted on his face. “Sunshine and I have something to do.”
“One minute. Please.” She had reduced him to pleading with Bryan Singer.
Bella waved her arms around Bryan. “Wait inside. This won’t take long.”
Her letting him into her apartment was a big red flag. It almost confirmed every suspicion in his head.
The click of the door stretched the silence between them.
Bella spoke first.
“He called off his wedding to Nicole because of me.” Extending her hand, she tried to reach him but the tip of her finger stopped just short of his chest. “I feel bad for him. And...he really needs to have someone at this time in his life.”
“So putting a ring on your finger excuses everything he did to you? Are you really that materialistic?”
“It’s not about the ring. In fact, there’s no ring. Bryan and I have only agreed to be friends.” Blowing out a breath, she rumpled the sleeve of her sweater. “I can’t give you all the details, but Bryan is in a situation. I know how it’s like, because I was once in that situation, too. I need to help him. I didn’t expect he’d show up tonight, but I can’t turn him away. I can’t turn my back on him.”
“So you’re telling me to go?”
“I wish you could both stay, but…yes…I’m asking you to understand that he needs me more now. I’ll call you tomorrow. I’ll tell you everything you want to know, but for now, I want you to know, I never cheated on you.”
“You don’t have to call me tomorrow.” He didn’t know why he said what he said after that. “Actually, there’s something I forgot to tell you, too. I’m going back to LA a few days early, so it’s best if we leave it at this. We were going to break up at the end of December, anyway. Ten days earlier is not such a big deal.”
Her lips trembled. “If that’s how you feel.”
“That’s how I feel.” This had to be the smoothest lie he’d ever told.
She patted a half-assed kiss on his cheek. “It was great being with you. I had fun. And thank you for the script. I’ll cherish it for as long as I live.”
From her perspective, she was doing the right thing. That was what hurt more.
Shielding the little crumbled piece of paper in his pocket with a palm, Jamie nodded and pretended to possess the cool he didn’t. “Sure. I had a great time, too. I wished it could’ve ended better, but maybe that’s asking for too much.”
“I can still call you, right?” Her volume was dying.
“Please don’t.”
“Don’t be angry at me, Jamie. Bryan showed up unexpectedly…he has a situation. I’ll tell you everything. Just wait.”
“Have a great Christmas and New Year.” He waved and turned back like she’d never said anything.
Jamie didn’t know how he kept his feet on the ground. He just somehow did.
And somehow, he even managed to drag them away from her.
Distant. Cold.
“If you’re ever in New York again, we should meet,” she called out.
“Don’t know if I’ll be coming here again.” Pushed by a final spurt of courage, he dug his hand into his pocket.
Should he say it? Should he ask her to forget about Bryan and keep going with him?
He still had a chance. If he gave it his all now, she might change her mind. He might be able to hold onto her.
But his finger twitched. His heart sped. And his intuition made the decision for him.
He wouldn’t.
If she was willing to take her ex back so easily, then she really didn’t care about him, did she? Did he really want to be with such a woman? She might be funny, smart, and great in bed, but did all that matter if she didn’t love him?
And she didn’t love him. She’d never said she loved him. She still didn’t.
“Goodnight.” He turned on his heel, not sure she’d heard that.
He hoped she had, because they were the last words he was ever going to say to her.
Chapter 16
Even as tears streamed down her face in rivulets, Bella refused to give in to the urge to run after Jamie, crush him in an embrace and profess her love to him.
What would she say to him, anyway? What could she say that would change his mind?
She could tell him she loved him, but she couldn’t command him to love her back. She couldn’t beg and cry for him to keep seeing her, keep talking to her, to give her more than he was already giving.
It was meant to happen, Bella reasoned. If not today, then ten days later.
She knew he didn’t want messy entanglements. In the entirety of their time together, he’d never mentioned love. He had his writing. He could hook up with anyone anytime. That was the life he wanted—simple, commitment-free.
She couldn’t tell him to give up his career in LA to stay here with her, and she couldn’t quit her job to move, either, especially if he didn’t want her there. She couldn’t tell him to marry her by October.
The worst part of loving one-sidedly was the helplessness. Watching him walk away and not being able to say anything convincing to make him stay. No matter how badly she wanted him, there was only one way for this to work—him loving her back and agreeing to stay in New York. That was as likely to happen as a blue moon.
Growing smaller, his form disappeared, along with all the hope in her body.
Discomfort would fade, she consoled herself. Time would erase memories. One day, she’d forget his face, his voice, his presence. One day she’d forget that she’d ever loved.
Drying the tears plugged in her eyes, Bella took a brave step inside her apartment.
Bryan was sprawled on her bed.
“You kept me waiting.” Irritation laced his tone.
“Cover up.” She threw a blanket over his bare chest. “Aren’t you cold?”
Her heart wasn’t into it. She wanted to eat Ben & Jerry’s, curl up on the couch, and bawl her eyes out as she read Love Me Like You Do Part 2.
“Sunshine, thanks for sending him away.” His arms, corded with muscles, imprisoned her. Her cheek crashed into the memory foam mattress, missing Bryan’s shoulder blade by a whisker. “There’s something I want to tell you and I need you to listen nonjudgmentally.”
“Okay, fess up, Bryan. When did you get back on drugs?” Tossing to the other side, Bella averted her face from him. “Isn’t that what you wanted to tell me?”
“How can you tell?”
She’d known the instant he’d shown up shirtless that something was wrong. No
one in their right mind would be shirtless when it was thirty-six degrees outside. While Bryan was crazy, he wasn’t that crazy.
“I worked at a rehab center, remember?”
But the truth was, that once, many years and nights ago, she’d been in the same position as him. Alone, scared, tired, at the end of her rope. She’d stormed up to Kat’s apartment, on the verge of breaking down, fainting, falling apart. Her bulimia had been killing her and she’d needed someone to talk to, some place to go to where she could find a few moments of respite from her madness. She’d needed a friend who would give her a way forward, help her find the strength to deal with her condition and support her while she healed.
That was why she hadn’t been able to turn Bryan away today. He’d looked exactly like she had all those years ago, and her emotions had been swayed.
Bryan gave a sad smile. “I’m not doing coke or anything. It’s the anti-depressants my doctor prescribed. They give a nice high.”
“Check yourself into rehab. That’s all I can say.” There was no other course of action.
“I can’t. I’m performing live on Ellen in a week. Then I have a world tour. My fans are counting on me.”
“Shhh.” Bella snapped her finger. “Your health’s the most important thing. You’re not surviving the tour next year unless you get your head straight.”
“I need your help, sunshine. I can’t afford rehab. I need you to keep me in check.” Bryan’s hand slapped the mattress.
“I’m not qualified to do that. I wouldn’t know what to do.”
“Just hide away my medicines. Ration them out to me. Find ways to keep me distracted.”
“What’d be the point of that? You can buy more medicines anytime.”
He clicked his tongue. “I hate you for giving me that idea.”
She moistened her throat with spit. “You’re not a kid and I’m not your mother, so act like an adult and deal with the fact that you’ll have to go to rehab.”
He fell silent, like he was considering it. For his sake, Bella hoped he was.
A long swish of air whooshed from his mouth. “If I check into rehab and my connection with the outside world is cut, what’ll happen to us? We were supposed to start dating next year.”
“About that…I’ve changed my mind.” Bella spread her arms. “That day, I was feeling bad for you and kinda desperate, so I said yes, but I didn’t really mean it. I’m sorry. don’t think we should get together again.”
She would’ve climbed into an upright position, but she’d lost the will to move, so she lay pinned under his arm. Breathing shallow. Trying to keep herself from shattering.
“But you’re with me right now.”
“Another mistake. But this time I didn’t know I was making it.”
She’d seen Bryan’s reddish eyes and all the alarm bells had gone off in her head. She’d completely ignored Jamie and decided to set things right with Bryan first.
A terrible idea, because Jamie had used the opportunity to cut their relationship short. Ten days wasn’t much, but she wanted those ten days so badly. In those ten days, they could’ve made love ten more times, watched ten more movies, had ten more dinners, shared ten more meaningful conversations.
“You’re right. With the way I am now, I don’t deserve you. I need to get my shit together. If you could wait for another month—”
“It’s not about time. I’m…in love with someone else.” The words were out before she could control them.
Images of Jamie flashed before her blurry eyes. Here she was, hair’s breath from the sexiest man on the planet (according to People magazine) and she was struggling to even look at him. Actually, she didn’t give a damn about anything anymore, because what she cared about was already gone.
“The guy who just went?”
Bella slowly nodded, starting to cry. “I didn’t realize it was happening and then suddenly, boom! I’ve been in love with him all along.” Her heart thundered. “Even if I marry you, I have nothing to give you. He has all of me.”
She wailed, embarrassing herself completely.
“If you love him so much, why did you let him go?”
“Because I had no choice.” A heavy feeling settled over her chest. “He’s moving back to LA for work. He doesn’t want to do long-distance. I doubt he’ll change his mind and stay here. I don’t know how to make it work.”
She was complaining to Bryan about relationship problems. Wasn’t that ironic?
“You could move to LA. I’d like to have you close to me.” He moved his hand towards her, but she slid her cheek away.
“It’s not so easy getting a job on the opposite coast. And I don’t know whether I want to risk it when I don’t even know whether he loves me or not.”
“He was very territorial about you earlier. My masculine intuition tells me that he loves you.”
“There is no such thing as masculine intuition,” Bella snarled.
“Don’t be sexist. Men have intuition, too.”
Bella didn’t reply. A companionable silence wrapped around them. There was no way out of this.
“Look at us,” Bryan said, sounding philosophical.
“Two messed up people, lying side by side.” Bella completed his sentence.
“Do you think we’ll ever be normal again?”
Sighing, Bella squeezed a pillow. “I don’t know about me, but I figured out a solution to your problem.”
“And I found a solution to yours.” Supporting his weight on an elbow, Bryan raised his torso.
Bella sat up, alert. “Really?”
“Yeah, but you go first. Because I’m a selfish dick that way.”
Springing to her feet, Bella raced to her laptop and started clicking through folders. “Somewhere in here, I have the number of Nancy Sewell from North Shore Recovery Center.” Nancy had been a primary therapist at NSRC, where she’d part-timed as a receptionist during graduate school. “She has a private psychotherapy practice now. She could help you. There’s a chance that you might be able to get better with private sessions alone and they can be scheduled at your convenience.”
“I should’ve thought of that.” Bryan slapped his forehead. “But my mind’s so weird these days that I don’t think much.”
Jotting down the number and address, Bella buried it in Bryan’s jeans pocket. “And now, what’s the solution to my problem?”
“Call him and tell him that you love him,” Bryan said.
“That’s desperate. I don’t want him to feel guilty about not loving me back.” Bella balled her hands into fists. “And he won’t believe me, anyway. He’ll think things ended badly with you so I’m trying to go back to him.”
“Well, then you could always get some counselling to get over him and come back to me, now that we have the rehab thing sorted.” Bryan quirked his lips.
“You don’t understand. I can’t love you. It’s like you going back to Nicole. What’re the chances of that happening?”
“Zero.”
“Ditto.”
“Sunshine, we could make it work. I’m committed. I want to marry you.”
“But I don’t want to marry you. In fact, I don’t want to marry anyone. I want to make it work with Jamie.” Her voice was impassioned.
It didn’t matter that she’d lose her last chance at marriage. It didn’t matter that she’d be alone all her life.
Because ten days and a chance with a man she loved was worth much more than a lifetime with one she didn’t.
“I don’t want to lose you a second time.”
“First, you never had me. Second, you’ve already lost me.”
Finding her phone, Bella typed furiously.
There’s something I forgot to tell you and I need to say it now. Please meet me at your apartment.
Bella didn’t expect a reply. Jamie would be too raw to reply. If he wasn’t getting stoned somewhere, that is.
“I have to go.” She grabbed her purse. “You should get going, too.”
Bryan blocked the door. “When will we meet again?”
Rewording her message to Jamie, Bella looked up. “I can’t say. We don’t have any reason to meet again.”
“I get it that you don’t love me, but won’t you at least friend-zone me?”
Bryan and she being friends? It was unimaginable. And it’d be awkward as hell, especially if he kept showing up shirtless.
“No.”
“Sunshine—”
“No.”
*
Thirty messages later, Bella was outside Jamie’s apartment, freezing into an ice sculpture.
Flimsy, fancy clothes had not been made to withstand cold winter evenings, but she’d been in such a hurry, she’d not thought of changing.
Jamie was not at home. Her calls went unanswered. No matter how many times she buzzed, nobody answered.
Bella understood that he needed time to get over what had happened. But she was afraid that if she gave him too much time, he’d get over her.
Bella: I’m waiting outside. Please come before I get a frostbite. P.S. I love you.
Moments later, he replied.
Jamie: P.S. I’m busy.
Bella: I want to apologize for what happened. Talk to me.
Jamie: I can’t talk tonight. Just go.
Bella: I’m not going anywhere. If you won’t talk to me, at least let me see you’re OK. It’s late and you’re still not home.
Seconds later, he sent a photo of him with another woman. His hand was slung over her bare shoulder. Silicone boobs spilled from the V of her halter-neck. Jealousy and possessiveness dug their talons into her.
Jamie: I’m OK. Great, actually. Made a new friend. J
Because the cold was numbing her feet, Bella moved into the smallish lobby that was a lot warmer. She wasn’t possessive, but she hated seeing him with another woman.
Bella: You moved on fast.
Jamie: Not as fast as you.
Bella: Bryan and I r not together.
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