Page 65 of Before You Fell

One word. It’s worse than the slap she gave me at our last concert.

I unlock the door and the music crashes back in. It’s loud, filthy, and alive, swallowing the room behind us as if nothing had happened in there.

I step into the hallway first, without looking back or taking her hand.

Chapter Eleven

Willow

Two days later and Phoenix is still under my skin.

Not in a soft, romantic way. There are no rose-colored memories tangled in the sheets. No gentle afterglow warming the room. And no pretty little lie my heart can crawl into and use as shelter.

There is only the ache.

It lives between my thighs, deep in my hips, and along my neck, where his mouth had been too rough and too greedy to pretend it meant nothing. It sits beneath my ribs, where something stupid and hopeful had tried to bloom while he was still inside me, looking at me as if I were not another bad decision in a room already full of them. I can still feel his mouth at my ear telling me he wanted me and how he had wanted me longer than he should have.

My body remembers him before my pride has a chance to drag itself out of the wreckage.

That’s the cruelest part.

After all of that, after his hands and his mouth and the hard, desperate way he fucked me as if he were trying to prove something to both of us he turned away. He fixed his jeans and put his smirk back on as if he had not just cracked something open inside me.

“Well,” he said. “We should get back out there.”

The words sit heavy in my chest.

I stare at the ceiling of my bedroom as morning light cuts through the gap in the curtains.

I squeeze my eyes shut and lie here as the brutal little truth presses down on me. I let my best friend fuck me in a storage room and now I am trying to figure out whether I was a mistake, a fix, a conquest, or something he regretted the second his cock was out of me.

The worst part is that I can’t even hate him.

God, I want to. I fucking want to. I want to wake up furious at him for his arrogance, his selfishness, and the fact that I might have been another woman added to his long list of terrible decisions.

Instead, shame floods my stomach because I believed him when he said he wanted me. For a few terrible minutes, I thought I mattered to him in a way he could not laugh off.

Then he turned his back on me.

I get out of bed and go straight into the shower.

The water pours down on me, hot enough to sting and hard enough to make me flinch when it hits the tender skin at the side of my neck. I stand beneath it anyway, letting it run over my hair, my face, my shoulders, as if heat could rinse him out of places he had no right to leave himself. Steam gathers against the glass until the bathroom disappears behind it, and for a while, that seems easier. Being blurred. Being hidden. Being nothing but breath, water, and skin that still remembers too much.

I scrub until the soap turns slick beneath my palms and my skin begins to burn. I scrub my neck where his mouth had been, my thighs where his hands had held me open, and my hips where the ache sits deep and mean.

The bruises from his fingers are still there when I pull on my jeans. Of course they are.

Phoenix Stone doesn’t even have the decency to ruin me in ways I can hide.

I run a brush through my hair and try to make my face appear normal.

Normal is important. It means Jax will not stare at me with that loud, worried expression he wears when he wants to ask a question but knows I will bite his head off if he opens his mouth. Normal means Jett will not study me as if my face were a puzzle he has not yet decoded. Normal means Cruz will not go quiet, which is somehow worse than when he opens his mouth to talk.

They know what happened that night. Fuck, they warned Phoenix and I against it. And I saw the pity on their faces as I walked out alone, after I ordered an Uber because Phoenix went straight to the bar, ordered a drink, and leaned in to talk to some blonde as if he had not been inside me less than two minutes earlier.

As if I were nothing. As if I had imagined the whole filthy, stupid, heart-shattering thing.

Normal means Phoenix doesn’t get to humiliate me twice.