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“I can’t lie and say that doesn’t make me happy.” Margot sniffed. “I’m so mad at you for being with someone else, but...you were young and hurt—”
“I was young and stupid. I should’ve just talked to him. But alas, that is what stupidity does to a person...it hides the clearest, most logical path. Instead of telling Aslan how hurt I was finding the condom and how much I wanted to believe he ached for me and only me, I didn’t have the strength. What if he told me he’d been sleeping with half the town? What if he told me, to my face with no room for doubt, that he truly wasn’t in love with me?
“I wouldn’t have survived it. The depth of love I had for him terrified me. It still does. A single emotion has the power to twist my stomach, crack my bones, and rip out my heart. I honestly believed I’d die from how much I loved him, and I think he felt the same. That was why we clung to the shore a little longer. Why we played those stupid games. Because...the moment we let our love wash us away, we’d drown. Everything would change. Everything would come crashing down, and...we weren’t ready.”
I rubbed my chest and finished my drink. The alcohol didn’t soothe my inner turmoil and I placed the goblet back on the tray before balling my hands. “I dated Joel for fourteen months. I celebrated my seventeenth birthday with him and inched ever closer to eighteen. I lost my virginity in his bed when his parents were away, all while Zara was in her room getting hot and heavy with Hadleigh. I waited for the lance of pain as he entered me, but the sharp sting from my body was nothing compared to the wrenching wound in my heart.”
“That must’ve been so hard.” Margot sighed. “To lose your innocence to someone who wasn’t the boy you truly loved.”
I spun my ring. Spinning, spinning, always spinning. “At the time, I thought it was the hardest thing I’d ever have to do. But it soon turned out to be one of the easiest.”
Margot sucked in a breath. Dylan waved his hand for me to keep going, impatience in his gaze.
I looked away. “I was thankful Joel didn’t know I choked on tears instead of lust. I closed my eyes and gave him my body, all while Aslan kept my heart firmly trapped in his aptly named lion paws. But then...”
I trailed off and looked up, once again surprised to find two reporters and not the burning black stare of my beloved.
The way Aslan would just look at me.
God.
It killed me every time.
I looked back now and could pinpoint what was different about him to every other boy.
It was the way he looked at me. Plain and simple.
No one else ever looked at me that way.
He looked at me as if he already knew how our story would end because it was how it always ended. It wasn’t just fate but a strange kind of certainty that synced our hearts, merged our blood, and ensured we were born for each other. Over and over again.
It was his stare that undid me.
Every time I went home from sleeping with Joel, he seemed to know.
Every time he whispered hello and slipped from the house to the garden, his shoulders seemed a little more slouched.
Every time he caught my eyes and didn’t guard himself in time, his soul literally snarled at mine with a guttural howl and feral despair.
I felt more from just a look with Aslan than I ever did with Joel thrusting inside me.
And the longer it went on, the more I had to be honest with myself. I loved Aslan singularly, senselessly, and nothing I could do could stop it. Certainly not two teenagers fighting their hardest to pretend we hadn’t tripped into destiny well before we were ready.
Gathering up my crying pieces, I murmured, “After fourteen months of being Joel’s girlfriend, I could no longer pretend it was a fling. Joel whispered he was falling for me. Zara picked out her bridesmaid dress for our wedding. And even Joel’s parents joked at the dinner table that they better start saving to help us with a house deposit.
“I biked home that night with tears streaming down my face because I knew I had to break up with him.”
Settling back against the pillows, I smoothed down my dress and said as curtly as possible. “This is where things start getting hard...” I swallowed and braced myself. “I won’t sugar-coat anything. I won’t spare you a single moment of pain. Are you sure you want to continue?”
Dylan glanced at Margot.
Margot hunched and nodded. “Tell us.”
I didn’t pause.
I launched into the agony that I barely survived, needing to wade through it so I could breathe again. “The night I broke up with Joel was the single domino on a cascade of circumstances. One thing after another. One mistake leading to another and another...until they all crashed into the greatest mistake of all.”
