by Linde, K. A.
Brady turned down her street, and Liz’s head jerked at the sight in front of her. “Keep driving,” she barked.
“What?” Brady asked.
“Just keep driving. Don’t stop. Drive around the block.”
“Okay,” he said, continuing to the end of the street and taking a left turn. “What’s going on?”
“That Audi was Hayden’s.”
Brady slammed on his brakes and they came to an abrupt halt. Liz jerked forward against her seat belt and grunted as it cut into her shoulder. “Jesus, Brady!”
“Sorry. But what the fuck is he doing here? I thought you said you broke up.”
“We did. Well, I mean, it’s over since he wrote that article,” Liz told him.
“Wait, ‘it’s over’? Have you guys actually broken up?”
“We’re not together. It hardly matters if I’ve spoken with him,” she told him fiercely. “He refused to take my call all day when the story broke. He had his fucking byline next to Calleigh Hollingsworth’s,” she spat the name. “To me that means we’re over.”
“But you haven’t actually talked to him?” Brady asked. “And who the fuck is Calleigh Holling-whatever?”
“Brady, how was I supposed to talk to him if he refused to take my call? I couldn’t. It’s over. He’s the asshole who wrote the story about us. It’s over.” Liz massaged her aching shoulder in frustration. She didn’t want to have to deal with this, not with everything else in her head. “And Calleigh is the other reporter who broke the story with him. They used to date and now they’re working together in Charlotte.”
Brady’s grip on the steering wheel tightened and she saw him take incredible care to breathe evenly. “I can’t let you go in there. The guy is unstable and dangerous.”
“He wouldn’t hurt me.”
His head snapped to the side. “Are you serious?” he asked. “After what he did to you.”
“It wasn’t like that. Not that.”
“Well, whatever it was,” he said as if he didn’t believe for a second that it wasn’t exactly what he had said it was, “it was wrong. He’s already hurt you. I’ll be damned if I let him do it again. And what kind of guy takes a job with his ex-girlfriend? I’ll tell you. Someone who wants to fuck her while his girlfriend is hours away still in school.”
“Brady,” she snapped, shaking her head. “I don’t want to think about that. Ugh! Hayden and Calleigh. I can’t.”
“I’d put money on it.”
“Can we just drive and not talk about that?” she asked. Brady eased down the road again slowly. He clearly wasn’t in any hurry to drop her off.
“Can I take you somewhere safer?” he pleaded.
“I’m safe at my house. I just . . . I need to talk to him, Brady. He’s there for a reason, and I need to let him know that it’s over. He has to already know, but wouldn’t you feel better if I told it to his face?”
“Fine. You want to go in there, I’m going with you,” he said stubbornly.
“Are you out of your mind?” Liz asked. “Did you forget that you’re a congressman and he’s the asshole who wrote the story about you? Do you want to give him ammunition to write about you? I certainly don’t! I thought we talked about letting the story blow over. I guarantee it won’t if you storm into my house and confront Hayden.”
Brady ground his teeth together and didn’t say anything. She knew that she was right. She needed to confront Hayden about what had happened. Brady didn’t. He would only take a bad situation and make it worse. She didn’t want anything to get worse than it already was.
“Will you just drop me off on the corner?” Liz asked, pointing up the street.
“Liz,” he pleaded.
“I’ll be okay, Brady. I’ll call you after he leaves,” she told him.
He sighed heavily and then pulled over at the end of the street. “You have the right number now?”
“Yeah,” she murmured, grabbing her purse off the floor. She found Clay’s phone in the bag and handed it to Brady. “Will you give this back to Clay? He’s probably wondering how he managed to lose it.”
“I can’t wait to give it back to him,” Brady said with a devilish smile on his face.
“Don’t be too hard on him, okay?”
“I don’t make promises I can’t keep, baby,” he said, grasping her chin in his hand and kissing her hard on the mouth.
“I know you don’t.”
“Promise you’ll be safe?”
Liz nodded softly. “Promise.”
“Good.”
They kissed again desperately, like a drowning person gasping for their last breath. Then Liz pulled away and exited the car.
With a heavy heart, she clutched her purse to her chest and started walking down the street to her house. She hadn’t checked her phone yet and at this point she was kind of afraid to. Had Hayden called? Did he have some kind of explanation? Not that it would change her mind at this point.
She slid her phone out into her palm. She checked her text messages and saw half a dozen from Victoria freaking out about her leaving with Clay and never returning, then another handful in all caps about Hayden showing up and asking what the hell she was supposed to tell him. Hayden had called and texted her even more than that. The messages started the morning after the article went live and ended only a couple minutes ago, when he had been trying to figure out where she was. She wished she had checked her phone so that she would have been more prepared for his appearance, but there was nothing she could do now.
As she walked up the driveway and to the front door, she steeled herself for what was about to happen. At least Victoria was there. Liz might have been confident when sending Brady away, but she didn’t really want to be alone with Hayden. She didn’t think he would do anything, but she had no guarantees.
Liz pushed the door open and walked into the living room, only to find Hayden and Victoria screaming at each other.
“I don’t fucking care why you’re here, Lane, but she’s not fucking here. So get out of our fucking house, you douchebag. Haven’t you done enough damage? Just thought you’d come over to inflict more pain on my best friend?” Victoria threw in his face.
“Vickie, just shut up,” he cried, spitting out her name as viciously as she had said his. “I’ve had enough of your shit. I don’t even want to talk to you. I’m here for Liz.”
“Well, I’m right here,” Liz said softly.
“Liz,” Hayden said, turning to face her.
“You’re back,” Victoria said. Her eyes bugged, asking a million questions at once. Where were you? Did you sleep with that guy? Were you with him this whole time? What’s going on? Can I kick Hayden out?
“I am.”
“Where were you?” he asked.
“Like you have a right to ask that!” Victoria yelled, slapping him on the back of the head and walking over to Liz. “You don’t have to talk to him, Liz. Just send him packing.”
“I had a pretty traumatic Friday. I needed to escape. So I did,” Liz said, answering Hayden’s question. “What are you doing here?”
“I needed to talk to you, to explain,” he said.
Now that she got a good look at him, she realized that he didn’t look like himself. He had stubble growing in on his jaw and his clothes were wrinkled, as if he hadn’t changed them recently. The only time she had seen him this disheveled was last October, when she had walked out on him after their argument.
“I’m not sure what you needed to explain. I think I understand completely what happened,” Liz said, completely cool and resolute. Any apprehensions about coming in here had faded. She felt a dose of Brady’s confidence fueling this conversation.
“Can we talk in private, please?” Hayden asked, glancing over at Victoria and then back.
“Oh what? Like the last time we talked in private?” Li
z asked harshly.
Hayden winced. “I—”
“Don’t have a good enough excuse for anything. And you never did.”
Victoria smirked. “I feel like I need to go pop some popcorn for this.”
“Victoria, really not helpful,” Liz said, shaking her head.
“Fine. I’ll be in the kitchen. If I hear anything at all that is out of place, I will be in here to beat the shit out of you, Lane. Don’t think for a second that I’m lying.”
He just stared at her with stone-cold eyes as she walked away. She left the kitchen door open, so there was no mistaking that she would be back in a matter of seconds.
“What are you doing here? Just spit it out so we can get this over with.” Liz crossed her arms over her chest and waited.
“I . . . I came to apologize for what I did.”
Liz started laughing in his face. “Oh, you’re serious. How sad.”
“What’s wrong with you, Liz? Why are you acting like this?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know!” she said, raising her voice. “Maybe because when I confided in my boyfriend a secret I’d never told anyone but my best friend, he went and wrote about it in the newspaper so now the entire world knows!”
“I didn’t put your name out there. No one else knows that it’s you.”
“Right! Because that makes it better and suddenly absolves you from fault! Are you that stupid? Someone could figure it out, and even if they don’t, you still betrayed my trust in such a way that could never in a million years be repaired. How could I ever trust you again? You didn’t even have the decency to tell me you were doing it or fucking call me back that day to face what you had done!”
“Liz . . .”
“You’re the definition of a coward, Hayden.”
His jaw clenched and his hands balled into fists. She was pushing his buttons and feeding on his insecurities. He had to have known that this was going to happen. There was no coming back from what he had done. If he thought that she was going to let him walk all over her again, he was sadly mistaken. That Liz was never resurfacing.
“I came to explain. Are you at least going to let me explain?” he demanded.
“Sure. Go ahead and try to explain to me how this happened.”
“Look, I didn’t mean for it to all go this way. I was upset about everything and I ended up talking to Calleigh about you. She tried to comfort me. Told me to throw myself into work. That’s when I spilled about the story. I didn’t give her your name or anything . . .”
“Ugh! Digging the hole deeper,” she muttered under her breath.
“It wasn’t like that. You know I’m not interested in Calleigh!”
Brady’s words echoed in her mind about Hayden and Calleigh. “Sure seems that way to me.”
“Nothing happened, but when I told her about the story, she pitched it to the editor without telling me. Once it was approved, I didn’t have much choice but to run with it.”
“Right. Try to claim that you didn’t have a choice. Make it not about you. See if that works,” she said.
“I messed up. I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you. I wanted to do it in person, but . . .”
“But what?” she snapped. “You lost your balls and had to go looking for them all weekend?”
Liz heard Victoria snort laughing from the other room. That only ticked off Hayden more.
“Are you serious right now?” he yelled into her face. “I’m trying to apologize to you. Can you take this seriously for a second?”
Liz raised her eyebrows. “If you yell at me one more time, Hayden Lane, I promise that you will never be welcome in my house again. And I don’t make promises I can’t keep,” she said menacingly. Brady sure had an effect on her.
“Sorry,” he apologized again. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“You’re probably itching for a cigarette,” Liz said offhandedly.
“What?”
“Oh, you thought I didn’t know that either?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Lies. All lies. They just build the fire into an inferno,” she said, shaking her head.
“I don’t smoke!” he said, raising his voice again. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . Why do you think I smoke?”
“Oh, because I saw you do it in October when you left the newspaper.”
“You were watching me?”
“It seems the only way to get you to tell the truth!”
“I used to smoke,” Hayden admitted. “When I was in high school, the other guys on the track team smoked, but I quit. High-stress situations make me crave them.”
“How many high-stress situations have you been in lately?” Liz asked accusingly.
“A few,” he said stiffly. “But that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to try to make things right. How can I make things right?” He splayed his hands out in front of him and took a step forward.
“If you came here to fix things, then you should have never come. You can’t make it right. There’s absolutely nothing that you could say to me that would get me to change my mind. You’ve already done enough damage here. I think you should maybe do some soul-searching and see how much you totally fucked up the best thing you’ll ever have in your life. How does it feel knowing that you ruined your own life?” she said calmly. “I hope that Calleigh beats you to that promotion and drops your ass. It would be what you deserve.”
Hayden’s mouth dropped open and he just shook his head. “So I can’t make this better?”
“No,” she said resolutely.
“There’s no reasoning with you?” he asked, pleading with his big hazel eyes for some way to make it up to her.
“I couldn’t think of a single thing that you could do to fix this. You broke me. You broke us. It’s over,” she said, her voice cracking. “And I think you should just go.”
Hayden nodded, accepting his fate. As he pulled the door open to exit, he turned back to face her. “I am sorry, and I will never stopping looking for a way to make this right.”
The door closed behind him and the energy left Liz in a huff. Emotionally she felt as if she had just run a marathon that she had never trained for. She stumbled to the couch and crashed back into the cushions. She didn’t think she would have been able to keep going even if she had wanted to. Her heart felt heavy, but at least she knew one thing: she still had Brady.
Victoria rushed into the room. “Is he gone?”
“Yeah, he just left,” Liz murmured. “I can’t believe I said all of that. I can’t believe it’s really over.”
“Me either, but the bastard deserved every word. So . . . what happened?”
“With Hayden? Didn’t you hear the whole thing?” Liz asked.
“No! With the guy you left with on Friday. I heard you come home, but then you went right back out with him. Was he good? Were you in a sex coma? Why didn’t you answer your fucking phone, bitch!” Victoria said, punching her lightly in the arm.
“Oh, Clay. No, I didn’t sleep with him. I knew him when I walked out with him.”
“No fair! That wasn’t the game.”
“He’s Brady’s brother,” Liz told her with a sigh.
“You left to have sex with Brady’s brother!” Victoria gasped.
“Well . . . originally.”
“Holy fuck! I underestimated you. Forget my threesomes . . .”
“Foursomes,” Liz muttered under her breath.
“You might be dirtier than me!”
Liz shook her head. “Not possible.”
“Are you going to sleep with both of them?” Victoria literally gasped. “At the same time?”
“Victoria, no. You’re living out your own fantasies, not mine. Clay is really good-looking, but I have no interest. I spent the weekend with Brady at his lake house
.”
Victoria shrieked and bounced up and down in her chair. “Oh my God! I’m so excited. Did you guys fuck? Are you back together?”
Liz smiled coyly, her eyes drifting down to her hand. “Yes . . . on both counts.”
“Okay. Okay,” she said, trying to stay calm but not succeeding. “Tell me all about it. You had sex with a congressman. This is too good to go without details.”
“I’m not giving you details! We had sex . . . a couple times.”
“Like how many times?” Victoria asked, clapping her hands together.
“I don’t know.” Liz started counting in her head. “Um . . . like five times.”
“That’s like fifteen orgasms! Lucky girl!”
“You’re ridiculous!” Liz said. “Fifteen orgasms? Jesus, Vic.”
“Oh, maybe I’m just that lucky,” Victoria said with a wink. “But, girl, you’re with Brady. What does that feel like?”
Liz sighed and leaned back into the couch. “Perfection.”
Chapter 29
MISDIRECTION
Liz took some Tylenol and then collapsed into her bed. The emotional roller coaster she had been riding the past week exhausted her, and all she could think about was sleeping through the day. Luckily Massey was covering the paper this weekend, so she could be a bum another day longer.
She couldn’t believe everything that had happened. All she could concentrate on was Brady. She was with Brady. And not just that, but he wanted to go public with their relationship.
It all felt so fast. And she felt ridiculous thinking that. A year ago if he had told her that he didn’t want to hide their relationship, she would have been jumping up and down, but so much had happened since then. The thought of being out in the open when she hadn’t been with the person more than a weekend in over a year made her nervous inside.