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“Brooke—”
“Yep. That’s the truth, Chase. The unvarnished shitshow! I’ve fucked you in my head since the moment I met you, and now I’ve fucked you in way more ways than the one I always fantasized about. How’s that for flawed?”
My jaw is firm, and my heart is sore as I consider the implications of all the things she’s saying to me right now—of all the lies she’s told me for weeks and weeks.
“I’d say it’s pretty fucked up,” I admit, my voice hard even to my own ears. Talking to Brooke like this…it’s unnatural. My stomach is literally turning in on itself.
But even that—feeling the drive to protect her—is a behavior built on falsehoods. Who is the woman I thought I knew?
Who is Brooke Baker at all?
“For someone who claims to have written a book about a crush on me, you sure seem to have found some things to hate,” I say, shaking the paper in my hand.
“No, Chase. No. I don’t think those things at all—”
“Oh, come on, Brooke. You wrote them, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I did, but—”
“But nothing, Brooke,” I cut her words off before they can put on gym shoes and run all over me. “They’re your words, your truths, and I think they tell me more than the rest of the time we’ve spent together. Time, I see now, was all some part of a sick game or something.”
This is too much for my brain and heart to comprehend. The hotel room feels like it’s growing smaller by the second and my only option for survival is to escape.
I toss the papers down and grab my backpack, headed for the door.
She’s blocking the path since the bathroom is at the front of the room, but I don’t stop even when she grabs my arm.
“Chase, please. You’re getting this all wrong. Let me explain.”
“Explain? Now? After you’ve tricked me and lied to me all this time?” I shake my head. “I don’t think so, Brooke. The time to explain was a while ago. Maybe the night I asked you if you ever felt like Clive and River. Before you spewed some bullshit about loving me.”
“But it’s not bullshit,” she cries, grabbing at my arm again as I open the door. She says more, but my ears can’t hear it. My mind can’t process it.
I can’t do anything but leave this hotel room before it suffocates the life out of me.
Thinking I had the world in my hands, only to find out I don’t know anything at all, hurts way too much. Looking at the woman I thought I knew enough to love—to risk my entire career for in half a dozen ways—feels like twisting a hot knife in my chest.
I can’t stay here another minute. I can’t and I won’t.
I shove through the door and walk as fast as I can.
Away from Brooke Baker and everything I thought she was and back toward reality.
Love hurts. But losing it before you’ve even really had it? That burns like a bitch.
Brooke
Chase’s back has never looked bad in all the time I’ve known him, but it looks pretty fucking shitty right now. His lines are hard and his gait steady as he walks away from me toward the elevator of the hotel at a near run.
And I’m just standing in the hallway, with wet hair and only a towel covering my body, and it feels like I’m watching my heart walk away from me.
His long legs have no trouble extending the distance between us, and with each long step, my breathing gets a little bit shorter.
I want to call out—to say something worthy of him turning around and bringing those long strides back toward me. But what do you say to a man you’ve been lying to for basically the whole time you’ve known him?
A man you involuntarily dragged into your twisted fantasies so far that he put his career on the line to support them. A man who’s been your everything for the last month, taking care of you in ways you never dreamed a man could or would—without even being your boyfriend.
I don’t know that there’s a bouquet of flowers in the universe big enough to right the wrongs I’ve perpetrated against him.
I’d love to claim it wasn’t intentional—but I knew from the moment he said the names Clive and River in his office that I had absolutely no intention of letting him in on the joke.
I just…I can’t even begin to figure out how to apologize. How to make it right. This isn’t exactly the kind of thing normal people do. Suzanne Somers did not give life advice for this one in her guide to life book, that’s for sure.
As Chase disappears on the elevator and the desolation of the situation comes into focus, I close the door and sink to the floor with my back against it, unable to stop the huge, bucking sobs of fat tears.
