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Give in already. I miss your taste.
Forever thinking of you,
Jay
17
DON’T BLAME ME BY TAYLOR SWIFT
Cat
Pictures of Jay, Cash, and Grace Kensington, one after another, hit me like a whip. They slice at my skin, tearing at the last semblance of control I’ve managed to hold on to over the last few weeks.
Grace Kensington.How did I miss it when Frank found her for Cash?
Before today, I’d only seen her once. But it only took that one picture for her to be seared into my brain. The picture from the articleJolieran about the happy new couple, Jonathan Hanson and his new girlfriend. Back then, she was Grace Winters.
Thatname has been seared into my brain for years.
My lungs burn as I try to suck in more air, willing myself not to return to that moment all those years ago when I stood at the table of my Paris apartment, cradling my baby bump, and read a story about how the man who’d told me he loved me completely had, without a single word to me, moved on with another woman.
The woman who is now married yet has somehow turned my brother into a fucking forlorn puppy chasing after her scraps.
And Jay too.
Unlike that photo, this one is candid. It’s my brother and Jay fawning—no, fighting—over Grace Kensington, the married matchmaker.
They were taken last week. My brother, idiot that he’s become since meeting Grace, was on a date with her. And Jay? According to the photographic evidence and the story that ran with it, he interrupted their cozy evening, and the way he’s looking at Grace makes it clear he’s interested in her. God, how many times did he look at me like that? Like I was his whole world. And I fell for it again and again.
Hell, I almost fell for his lies this time too. I actually thought he wanted me back. Not that I’d take him back, but God, did he have me fooled.
Bile worms its way up my throat, but I choke it back and shake my head.
“They get worse,” Enzo warns. He’s the lucky photographer I asked to do the story about the hot new restaurant. As luck would have it, he spotted my brother just as another photographer did. Angel that he is, he promised the photographer an interview with the magazine if the man agreed not to sell the damning pictures. But the one of Jay and Cash fighting over Grace was too valuable, apparently, and Enzo wasn’t able to finagle an agreement where that one was concerned.
Grace has yet to be publicly identified in any of the articles, thank God. The last thing my family needs is scrutiny over how my brother is dating a married woman.
What a fucking nightmare.
I fixate on the pictures that Enzo warned are worse. My brother—who swears he’s not dating Grace, who told me over and over again that he was disgusted, that he’d never entangle himself with a married woman—is grabbing her in a pretty freaking desperate kiss. I flip the pictures over, unable to stomach the lies and betrayal. “Thanks, Enzo. I owe you one.”
My heart breaks over Cash’s lies. I can’tnottake this personally. We’re best friends. We always have been. And he knows how I feel about cheaters. I thought he felt the same.
We grew up hearing stories about the affairs our father had. Of how, while my mother was dying of cancer, he was bedding every woman who walked by. And then he went and got our nanny pregnant. She was only seventeen at the time. Our family has somehow miraculously kept that story out of the press—and from Chase—for years.
For all of those reasons, I despise cheaters.
And that feeling only compounded when Mia cheated on me…and then Jay.
No one other than Sophie and Cynthia knows how broken I was after I found out that Jay had slept with Mia while we were together. That she has a child Chloe’s age.Chloe’s half sibling.
I close my eyes as hurt crawls its way through my body. It scratches at my inner psyche like it did for so many years when I thought of how two people I trusted more than just about anyone shattered that faith so tremendously.
Every relationship in my life has been tainted by their actions.
And now my brother is sleeping with the woman Jay moved on from me with.
And according to this article and the photos, Jay is unhappy about it.
