Page 22 of What I Like About You

“I did, at first. But when it all fell on deaf ears, I stopped. Should I have tried harder? Abso-fucking-lutely. But I was a teenage kid—I was too stupid and blinded by pretty cheerleaders. So I kept our relationship hidden. We hung out all the time, just the two of us, but I never invited her to parties or anything like that.” Dalton paused. He’d always known how he’d handled his relationship with Zara was wrong, but telling his friends now made him feel like an even bigger ass. “I was selfish. I wanted my cake and to eat it. I wanted to be popular and to have my friendship with her. I had it in my head that if we could just get through high school and go to the University of Georgia together, then things would be different. We wouldn’t have to be bound by all the fucking expectations that came with the old traditions of our families and all that crap.”

“So, what changed?” Kyle asked.

“Senior year, the captain of the basketball team asked her to prom, but as a joke. I swear I didn’t know until after it all happened. I wouldn’t have let him do that had I known. When she overheard some girls talking about it in the bathroom, she was devastated. So, I did what any best friend would do—I took her shopping. I got her a custom dress made from the woman who had made all of our mothers’ gowns over the years and set up salon appointments, etcetera, and I took her to prom.”

“Right, that’s exactly what any guy would do for a girl who was just a friend,” Cullen commented, sarcasm dripping from his words.

Dalton glared at him. “Maybe I went a tad overboard, but I needed her to know she was special. Special to me, in particular. I was too stupid to put into words how I felt about her, and I don’t know that even if I had been able to tell her what she meant to me that she would have taken me seriously. So, I pulled out all the stops. Thought that if I could just give her the fairy tale, that she would just know that I…whatever. And then it all went to shit.” Dalton sighed, recalling the memory as if it had been last night. “We were having a great time. Dancing and laughing and all the things you do at a dance. When she went to the bathroom, two of my buddies found me and were harassing me about bringing her. They kept calling her ‘Shamu.’”

“Like the whale at Sea World?” Kyle asked.

“That’s the one. They kept asking why I had brought her when I could have anyone I wanted. And I started to tell them she was the one I wanted, but they didn’t believe me. So, I played into it. I told them a story to get them off my back.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That I’d gotten a hotel room and that I was taking her there after the dance to take her virginity.”

“Mate, that’s horrible,” Cullen commented.

“That’s not even the worst part.”

“How does it get worse than that?” Kyle asked, walking over to lean against the rail next to Dalton.

“They called me a chubby chaser and said looking at her was a boner killer.”

“Ouch,” Kyle muttered.

“Still not the worst part,” Dalton sighed again, embarrassed to even be admitting to this behavior. “I brushed it off. I told them that…” he said, taking a deep breath before repeating the most horrible words he’d ever uttered. “That if I flipped her over and shut out the lights, that she’d be just like every other pussy.”

Even repeating the words now made him want to throw up. It had been a decade since he’d said them, but he still couldn’t believe he’d ever been so crass. About any woman, ever. But especially Zara. It wasn’t who he was, yet standing there with Chet and Jonah goading him, he’d turned into a different person. He hated himself for it and didn’t know that that would ever change.

“You did not!” Cullen exclaimed, jumping up from the trampoline.

“Dalton, that’s despicable.”

“Dude, still not the worst part,” he admitted, pushing off the railing. He started to pace in between his buddies, feeling his nerves get worked up as he got to this point in the story.

“I can’t imagine how it gets worse than that,” Cullen said.

“She heard me.”

“What?!” they both exclaimed.

“Zara walked up to us and overheard the entire conversation. All those years that I had spent telling her she was my best friend, and how much I trusted her, and all that, gone because I didn’t have the balls to admit how I really felt to my buddies.”

“There might be a special place in hell for you for that one, mate,” Cullen commented.

“Don’t I know it. She didn’t give me a chance to explain. She just told me she never wanted to see me again and ran off.”

“I don’t think I’d let you explain either,” Kyle said. “Frankly, you’re lucky all she did was run away and not hand you a swift kick in the nuts.”

“I would have deserved that swift kick, and probably worse.”

“I assume that wasn’t really your plan?” Cullen asked, a concerned look on his face.

“Not even close,” he said, stopping his pacing. “I mean, I had a room rented for us. But I didn’t plan on sleeping with her. Well, not sex at least. I had a whole bunch of her favorite movies lined up and figured we’d have a movie night rather than go to some party that I knew she’d never enjoy. It was a running joke between us that she always fell asleep during movies, so I had figured we’d curl up in bed and fall asleep together.”

“And instead you humiliated her,” Cullen pointed out, walking over and leaning against the rail in the spot Dalton had just occupied.