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After I knock on the door, I just walk into the house and yell out for him. “Dad, it's me!”
“Hey Me, come on in!” he yells back.
I walk into the living room and see him sitting on the couch with his leg in a traction machine that bends and flexes to maintain his mobility.
“I fucked up,” I say and slump down in the recliner.
Dad immediately switches the television off and looks at my face. I guess I'm not hiding my emotions very well because he looks at me with some concern.
“Fucked up how?”
“I paid off Avery's college tuition for the rest of the year.”
I begin to ramble as I spill my guts out about Avery. I tell him everything. I feel almost like a man confessing to his priest. I tell him all about Ethan and his job offer and I tell him about how she has already refused to let me help her out.
“Did she ask you to do that?” he asks, referring to me paying off her tuition.
“No.”
“What was your reasoning then?” His eyebrows scrunch together while he awaits my answer.
“I wanted her to not be so damn stressed out about money. I didn’t want her to have to take a job she absolutely should not take.”
“So you went behind her back and paid her college tuition without her permission? You put her in debt to you?”
“No! I mean… well, kinda. She thinks it’s a debt she has to pay off, but I could give two shits about the money or if she ever pays it back.” I say, mad at him for seeing what I didn't, and at her for taking it as a stupid fucking debt.
“You told me yourself she doesn't come from money and that you think she is probably a pay day away from losing her apartment. She has wolves already circling her, and while you may have been doing what you did with the best intentions, she probably has never seen free kindness, except for her grandmother.”
“But I didn't do this as some way of making her beholden to me, I wish she could see that.”
“She probably does understand that, but you didn't tell her. Whether it was for a good reason, it doesn't matter to her, you broke her trust. Remember she has a wolf circling around her and trying to get her to do his bidding all the time.”
“Fuck.”
“Yep.”
I slump further into the recliner and close my eyes. “I fucked up, but I would still do it again. She shouldn't have to be stressed like that for money, and it’s not like I was going to use it for anything. I know I could be considered a rich boy, but I don't try to waste my money. I thought I was making a smart investment in putting money towards our future. She wants to graduate college so she can do something with her life and help people. I want to make her my one and only, and that old adage of happy wife, happy life...”
“Happy yes, but you probably scared her into thinking you wanted leverage over her.”
“So what do I do?”
“Well, son, I think all you can do is to stay true to your word, give her the space she wants and hope it works out.”
“Fuck.”
Chapter Nineteen
Avery
After pushing Chase away, I’ve had an epiphany: Chase Winters is too good for me.
It’s something I’ve been carrying around inside me since the night he rescued me but I was too afraid to acknowledge. I felt it that night he rushed over to pick me up for the date, afraid he wouldn’t like me for who I really am. But I allowed myself to get swept up in the fantasy for a little while. Even thinking about it now, it feels as if it was some kind of fairy tale. I let myself pretend that it could work, and that it was all real.
That a guy like him, who has everything going for him could like a girl like me…. a girl who has nothing.
So after I spend a couple of days feeling sorry for myself and crying because I’m such a dumbass who ruins all the good things, I stop my little pity party and accept Ethan’s job offer. This is the way it has to be. This is the way it was always going to be. Chase and I are from two separate worlds, cut from different cloth. We wouldn’t have worked. It’s almost better that I freaked out before we went too far.
