Page 41 of Restored Dreams

His eyes pinch. “Lily pad—”

“Don’t call me that. Just admit what happened!” I’m screaming.

“I slept with someone else.”

Someone else? I scoff inside. Someone else!

My boyfriend slept with my sister while we were dating.

But we aren’t dating, are we? We were each other’s dirty little secret. We’d only been one place—his brother’s concert at a bar—and he had to sneak me in. My sister saw us there.

“What was all this?” I ask, waving my arm around the waiting space of this father’s garage. The question is rhetorical. I know what I wanted us to be. Each time he fingered me, each time his tongue split me open, each time his mouth met mine. I loved you.

“We were having fun.”

Slap. Punch. Kick. The words have taken the air out of me.

I’ve never hated a word so much in my life.

I loved you, I scream again inside my head.

But evidently, he doesn’t love me. He considers me a plaything.

I can never forgive you, I want to say, but I don’t. It would have no effect on him. He won’t care if I held that weight over him. He obviously didn’t care about me.

“I see,” I say instead, and Brut’s eyes narrow.

“That’s it?” His expression puzzles me with the anger in his tone, the hard lines to his face.

What else could I say? I understood? Because I didn’t, other than that I meant so little to him he could fuck my sister in some random bar because he had too much to drink.

“You aren’t going to yell, scream, hit me?”

“Would those things make a difference?” I ask, finding an eerie calm overcoming me. “Would they change what happened?”

Brut swipes a hand down his face and then brushes it back through his hair. “I don’t know how to make this right.”

Is there any way? “Never sleeping with her in the first place might have helped.” Sarcasm drips through my veins. Then something else creeps in. A cold rush. He never slept with me. Was Lauren correct? Did he think I was still a kid? Was he not attracted to me? I refuse to believe he wasn’t. He touched me. He kissed me. He told me he craved me. But he never gave in, and the evidence stands before me. He didn’t fully want me, as in love me, or he never would have cheated.

He’s a cheater, my heart screams. A cheater and a liar as he withheld the truth from me. Two weeks! My body trembles again in disgust. He kissed me after her. He’s touched me. He told me…oh God! I break, recalling what he said to me.

“You’re everything to me, Lily pad. Everything and beyond. Don’t give up on me.”

Foolish. I was stupid to believe him, holding out hope he was careful with me because he wanted it to be perfect. We would be together forever, so why rush?

He said those things knowing, knowing he’d been with her already.

My head shakes.

Don’t give up on him? He gave up on me.

“I don’t think we should see each other again.” I don’t even know why I say this. It’s obvious we won’t. My sister has come between us just as she threatened to.

“Lily, I think—”

“You’ve done enough, Brut. Just…just leave.”

It was ridiculous to say. We stand inside his father’s garage, the place of our secret rendezvous. I need to walk away, but I don’t have the strength. My knees still shake despite the desire to run away from him. He steps forward, reaching for my hands, but I withdraw in disgust. He catches them, quicker than me, and presses his lips to my knuckles.