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She stares out the window and swallows. “I’m scared, Madden. I don’t want anyone thinking—”
She leaves the rest unsaid, and it occurs to me that the reason she’s worried is because nobody can ever know Bianca was with me all night. She could never admit it without imploding her life. And I guess that answers the question of whether or not she meant it when she said I was what she wanted.
“I think you need to leave here,” she croaks. “It isn’t safe for you to stay. This could turn into something it isn’t, and I don’t know how to protect you.”
Heat boils beneath my skin as I turn away from her. I can’t look at her when she’s like this. So fucking hollow it doesn’t even sound like her. It would be easy to convince myself her concern is genuine, but Bianca has shown me who she is more than once.
“So that’s where we’re at?” I answer. “You want to use this as your out? You couldn’t just tell me the fucking truth?”
“That’s not how it is.” The words rip from her lungs on a painful sob. It sounds so real I could almost fall for it. But I’ve already decided I can’t believe a thing that comes out of her mouth.
“Please, Madden.” Her voice cracks. “I know this doesn’t make sense to you. But you have to believe me. It’s the only way to save us both.”
I have nothing else to say to her. So I get out of the car and walk the fuck away.
“How did it go?” Adam leans against the doorframe, watching me as I toss aside the dress shirt I wore to the funeral to exchange it for a tee shirt.
“About as expected,” I tell him. “It was pretty sad.”
“Total waste,” he says. “She was hot too.”
Leave it to Adam to make an inappropriate remark at a time like this. I don’t know if he’s always been this obnoxious or if I’m just looking for faults in him now. Either way, I’m not in any mood to have a conversation, but Adam doesn’t seem to give a shit as he makes himself at home on the sofa.
“People are talking,” he says. “Bianca’s been running her mouth all over town about how she saw Ada with you that night before she left.”
I look at him, and Adam shrugs.
“It’s her fucking friends. All they do is talk shit, and Bianca thinks she needs to keep up. But don’t worry, I shut it down. She won’t be telling anyone else.”
I mentally replay my conversation with Bianca in the car and wonder if I’m going fucking crazy. Because she failed to mention that she was the one who saw me with Ada that night. Was that why she came to my cottage? Because she thought Ada might be with me?
Adam kicks his feet up onto the coffee table and shakes his head. “You know I love the girl, but she needs to forget that group she runs with. I guarantee she won’t be gossiping with them when she’s my wife.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I mutter. “People will think what they want, regardless.”
He nods, but it looks like there’s something else on his mind, and I’m not sure I want to know what it is if it concerns Bianca. In the stretch of silence, his phone goes off. And it keeps going, alerting message after message in rapid succession.
“Who the hell is that?” I ask him.
“It’s Bianca.” He smirks. “Take a look at this. She can’t go two minutes without texting me.”
He flips his phone around and shows me his chat log with the contact named “AFT,” laughing when he sees my confusion.
“Adam’s fuck toy.” He fills in the blanks. “She put that in there herself. I told you she’s fucking nuts.”
I swallow the words I’ll regret as he scrolls through the messages. There must be thousands between them, just in the past week alone. It doesn’t escape my attention that she’s sending him heart emoji and porn GIFs. It’s the complete opposite of what she made their relationship out to be.
“She wants me all day, every day.” He tosses me a smug grin.
“Cool,” I reply as I walk to the mini fridge and grab a soda to give myself a second to get my emotions in check. It feels like he’s intentionally goading me right now, but I know that’s just my warped imagination trying to process this whole clusterfuck.
“How was she today?” Adam asks. “When you gave her a ride home?”
My stomach flips. Did Bianca tell him about that and not even bother to warn me? Of course, she did. Because she’s a pathological fucking liar, and she gets off on this shit.
“She was sad, but okay for the most part.” I turn around slowly, pausing to take a drink and not tasting a thing. “She wasn’t in a state to drive.”
