Page 136 of A Vicious Love

“I mean—” He stopped, breathing hard through his nose. “Fuck. I’m trying to say this right.”

That made me look up.

Jamison looked almost lost.

But unsteady in a way I had never seen from him. His hands flexed at his sides like they wanted to reach for me and knew better.

“I shouldn’t have said it like that,” he said. “About being drunk.”

“But you were.”

“That doesn’t mean⁠—”

“It does. It means you forgot it was me.” I finished before I could lose courage. “You forgot it was your fiancée you were kissing. I didn’t.”

Jamison looked past me toward Weston, who waited near the cars with his brothers and their wives.

“You’re not leaving with him.”

The tiny, fragile hope inside me disappeared. Not I’m sorry or it mattered.

Only an order.

I smiled because sometimes smiling was the last wall left standing.

“I am.”

His eyes narrowed. “Sienna.”

“No.” The word surprised both of us. It came softly, but it came. “You wanted me to sit where my place card told me to sit. I did. You wanted me not to make it a crisis. I tried.”

His face tightened.

I swallowed around the ache in my throat.

“Now I want to go swimming.”

The space between us felt full of things he had not said and things I had finally stopped asking for.

Jamison stepped slightly closer.

“Sienna,” he said again, but this time my name sounded rougher. Almost broken. “Don’t go with Weston because I was an asshole.”

“I’m not going because of Weston. I’m going because they invited me.”

I wondered if he understood the difference.

I stepped back, turned before he could answer.

Weston saw me coming and opened the car door himself. Before I got in, I looked once toward Emmie.

“We’re going midnight swimming,” I told her, as if she had not just watched the whole terrible thing happen.

Her smile trembled. “That sounds fun.”

“I might only swim.”

“That still sounds fun.”