“I’m starting to regret this.” Talon nods, but his eyes move back and forth between us like he doesn’t want to miss a single second.
Tia leans across the table, snatching the open bottle of wine and pouring a too-full glass. “It doesn’t exactly feel like normal dinnertime conversation. Should we talk about the time Jay and I had sex?”
Talon drops his glass, scotch splashing on the formerly pristine white tablecloth. “You had sex with my sister?”
“Jesus.” Jay scrubs his face, groaning into his hands. “No, Talon. She’s joking.”
“You don’t remember?” Tia slaps a manicured hand to her chest, smile visible over the curved crystal edge of her wineglass, eyes glinting. “I’m hurt, Jay.”
I think Talon shouts something about Jay having not only the audacity to have sex with his sister, but the audacity to not remember it. Jay might lean back in his chair, tugging on the ends of his hair while Tia bats her eyelashes at both of them like she didn’t just cause a shitstorm.
But I know why she did it.
She did it for her best friend.
For Sloan, who sits, back ramrod straight, blinking too much, eyes too blue, and her grip on the stem of her wineglass too tight, breathing in and out.
“Sloan.” I can’t help myself and I reach forward, tugging on the ends of her hair. “Why do you have my ring?”
I’m hoping for an answer I’m not going to get and one that I don’t deserve—that it means something more than it does.
That it means she doesn’t hate me.
I’ll learn to live without her, because it’s what’s best—but I don’t think I can live knowing she hates me as much as it seems like she does.
She jerks away from my hand, and I raise it in surrender.
“In your”—she inhales again, teeth coming down on the inside of her cheek, and I know what she’s about to say hurts her—“haste to leave me, you left quite a bit behind.”
I wasn’t in a hurry to leave her. I dragged my feet for months even though I knew she deserved better and always had.
She takes a small sip of wine, straightens her shoulders, and starts ticking things off on her fingers. “Clothes. Shoes. Books. Your cup ring, sitting on the nightstand on what was once your side of the bed.”
Her words trail off with a tiny crack of her voice, and she wipes a knuckle along her lash line before the tears start to fall.
I know what else I left behind. The word she won’t say.
Me.
It hangs heavy in the air, unsaid, and that fake fucking pain lances across my temple.
I press my fist into my thigh, kneading against the muscle so I don’t reach forward and try to smooth out the frown wrinkling her brow, kiss away the tears sitting on those freckles.
Sloan waves a hand, like we’re speaking about an errant nuisance in our past, not the destruction of our relationship by my hands, before she keeps talking. “And seeing as I had no means to contact you—”
“No means to contact me?” I cut in, incredulous. “My number didn’t change.”
I kept it the same—because I’m unhealed and selfish and a pathetic part of me hoped she’d call.
She tips her chin up. “I deleted your number. And then I deleted it from my brain.”
“That’s not how numbers work with you.”
She finally turns to look at me, slowly, entirely controlled, and she blinks those blue eyes, frozen now and all of her looking cold. “Well maybe something broke when you left, Bohdan.”
It’s not silent in the dining room, but it is at our table. Tia, Talon, and Jay staring at the broken pieces of a girl who deserved to be whole, and I can hear the phantom crack of my chest and spurt of blood across the white tablecloth.
I left because I didn’t want to hurt her anymore—I couldn’t do it for another second of another minute of another day.
