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She hurried away, and I watched as she disappeared into the festival lights.
CHAPTER 30
Yara
After paying for the peach pie, I grabbed two plastic forks and happily started my journey back to Alex. I didn’t think my heart stopped beating so fast since we sat on that blanket with one another. Everything I learned about him felt like the most special treat. The man who was once so hard was slowly opening up to me. Piece by piece, he showed me his soul, and I loved what he revealed.
“Yara.” I turned to find Cole.
Just like that, my floating feeling was snatched away. In came Cole—the joy sucker.
“I don’t have time to talk, Cole,” I said, stepping forward.
He hurried over to me and shook his head. “No, wait. Just…I need to talk to you.”
I sighed and turned toward him. “Aren’t you tired of this, Cole? This chase. I don’t want to be with you anymore. I don’t feel anything for you and—”
“The first time it was a random stranger. She was passing through town late one night and I pulled her over. She didn’t want a ticket, and well, long story short, we had sex in the back of her car.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What are you doing?”
“The second time it was with Lori, but it was a mistake. We were drunk and stupid. It only happened once.”
“Cole. Shut up,” I urged, feeling sick to my stomach from the facts he revealed. “I don’t want to hear—”
“But the main one was Keri,” he blurted out, making me pause my words.
I tilted my head toward him, confused. “Keri?”
He nodded. “She was the woman I was having an affair with. For years, actually. For the longest time, I thought that telling you would hurt you, but then it clicked that back then, you asked me repeatedly who the other woman was, and I lied. I didn’t want to hurt you. But, seeing you do all of this with Alex to get my attention, just to bother me, showed that you still cared. So I figured I should be upfront with it all and tell you. It was Keri.”
“No,” I choked out, my eyes burning with tears forming. “It wasn’t.”
“Yes.” He nodded. “It was. I mean, she still wants us to be a thing, but I told her that I wasn’t interested. I only want you. And—”
I started walking off in a daze. Confused. Hurt. Angry. Betrayed. I felt dirty. As if Cole had just rubbed all his sins in my face, trying to get a little more ache out of my heart. Trying to stab me with the same knives he’d been sharpening for months now. I hated how it hurt, too. I hated how he’d cut me. I hated how my mind spiraled, thinking about how Keri had been in my face for the past few years, pretending to be a friend. Pretending to care. Pretending that she wasn’t a cruel woman I’d employed.
“Yar,” Cole said, grabbing for my shoulder.
“Don’t,” I barked through gritted teeth, yanking myself away from his touch. I pointed a stern finger toward him. “Don’t ever touch me again, Cole. I mean it. Don’t ever speak to me again,” I warned.
Tears scaled down my face, and I hated that he witnessed it. I felt as if it gave him some sort of pleasure, indulging in my pain. He probably got off on knowing that he was still able to hurt me even though I’d left. That he was able to stab me so deeply and twist the knife.
But it wasn’t because of him that I was hurting.
It was because of her.
I walked back up to the hill, tears streaming down my cheeks. Before reaching Alex, I paused in front of Keri and her date’s picnic. She was laughing, carefree, tossing her head back and looking as beautiful as ever.
When she looked up, she had a smile on her face. That was until her stare met mine. Her face shifted as she rose from her seat. “Yara, I-I can explain,” she started.
“You’re fired,” I blurted out through the tears. My heart felt as if it had been ripped from my chest and hammered in as I looked into eyes that I believed were once so friendly. “From my shop and from my life,” I told her.
She began to cry, and I wanted to drown her in her tears because how selfish could she have been? How diabolical could a person be to sit in another’s face for so long and pretend as if they weren’t doing the worst thing imaginable?
“I’m so sorry.” She sobbed. “I’m so, so sorry.”
But I knew the apology was empty because it was only offered once she was caught.
I moved over to Alex’s and my blanket. My body shut down as everything began to blur. My knees felt weak as I stood before him. The second he saw me, he stood.
