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No fucking way.
I’m instantly sobered when it all hits me at once. I’ve seen these blue eyes before with this very same expression in them, but instead of flames dancing across them it was tears welling around them.
My gaze drops down to her lips. Those plump, feather-soft lips are formed in a sad pout. I’ve felt those lips before when they were inexperienced and innocent.
Looking back up into her eyes, I get it now. Idoremember Angie. Back then, she was Angelica, the math nerd.
Holy fuck.
“It was you.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Angelica
Why did she have to bring up their senior prom?
I couldn’t help my body from going rigid at the memories of the events around that time of year. I’m flushed by the heat of embarrassment for how stupid I was back then.
Am I still that stupid girl?
No, I’m so far from that girl I shouldn’t even be thinking back to the past when he hurt me. But I can’t help those old feelings from coming back. I don’t understand why Patience felt the need to bring the subject up.
She knows how much hell Cera put me through in school and how I can’t stand the woman even now. She feels the same. Yet I can’t hold it against her because she can’t possibly know what Cera did to me and, in turn, Chase took part in.
Nervously, I decide to attempt to play cool. The second I look up into Chase’s beautiful brown eyes, I lose it. Every insecurity bleeds up from the depths, and I know my expression is filled with the sadness that thinking back to then brings out in me.
I want to run away, bury myself in the emotions swarming me, but I’m stuck in my seat as Chase’s eyes search mine before dropping to my lips.
I can’t help myself from dropping my own gaze to his thin but still sexy lips. I know the second his inspection is complete from the intense heat I feel beating against my lids. There’s a resistance when I try to make eye contact with him again. I’m scared that when I meet him again everything will come flooding back to him, and he won’t want to try to have anything with me.
Quit being stupid.
I scold myself. There’s absolutely no reason Chase remembering and also learning the truth to why I rebuffed him at first can leave me insecure. It isn’t my fault.
Heshould be the one worried I’ll reject him once he remembers.
Heshould be the one who feels like I do now.
Heshould be the one who drops to his knees at my feet and begs for the forgiveness I have already given him.
I really have. He was a stupid teenage boy who was being led around by his dick and left to be a player in the games his ex exposed him to. I was an innocent—a casualty of everything Cera did. She didn’t care about the feelings of others and saw others as her playthings.
I know that doesn’t justify Chase’s issues with women in general, but it does explain some things.
“It was you.” My breath ceases. It doesn’t catch or drop out of my body, it just stops. Every other function in my body is also put on hold with those three simple words. The conviction in them is gut-wrenching while being filled with a cocktail of shock, disbelief, and salted with regret.
“It was.” Finally finding my breathing pattern, I confirm it. Will and Valerie, Duke and Patience, Holt and Jody, and even the bonfire before us fade into the darkness surrounding our little get-together as Chase and I keep our focus on each other.
What else do you say to the man who left you scarred for all of your adult life up until now?
Is he going to continue to let me live this life where I’m terrified to let any man in more than just a friend?
Again, the feeling of flight consumes me. There’s no fight in me for this. How could there be? What is there to possibly fight for? If his feelings don’t reflect my own near reluctant ones—at least, the ones forming for him now—then there’s no point in keeping this going.
My gaze fogs over with stress as a cool sweat beads on my forehead. My hands twitch to get me out of my seat, and my legs ache to carry me all the way back to my truck as quickly as I can, but I’m unable to move.
I don’t see Chase jump out of his seat, the force nearly causing it to collapse and fall backward. I’m jolted back to where we are when he lifts me over his shoulder and hauls me away.
