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“Hey,” I say, leaning down and kissing her upper arm. “I believe you. Back then, I didn’t know what to believe. I went home and broke the locks on Beckett’s bedroom door. And.” My throat catches at the memory of what I saw inside. “His desk was covered with sketches of you.”
A blurry film covers my sight, reliving one of the worst days of my life.
She presses onto her elbow. “Of me?”
Nauseated from the memory, I close my eyes and say, “Yeah.” I take a deep breath as I try to keep my dinner down. “I have a confession.”
Tears threaten but I pinch my lids with my fingers to hold them back. Her eyes widened and her shoulders slump. At this moment, she probably thinks I cheated on her but that is the farthest from the truth.
“You know that note I gave you in sixth grade, asking you if you wanted to be my girlfriend?”
“Yeah.” She stretches her neck, like is that all.
“The note was from Beckett.” You can hear a fly landing on the wall, she’s so quiet. Her mind runs miles a minute and she calculates my words. “When you smiled at me that day during assembly, I knew you were my girl. Then he asked me to give you the note, I peeked inside. I couldn’t let you be with him because then you would never be mine.”
As the words sink in, her body goes slack. Her head moves slightly from side to side. Her eyes strain when reality hits that I didn’t ask her to be my girl—my brother did.
She hops out of bed wrapping the cover around her. “Where are my clothes? God, I can’t believe this. Our whole love story is a lie. All of it. How many times have we told the story? How many times has Beckett heard us lie?”
I grab my boxers from the floor and slide them on while she’s tripping over my shoes trying to find hers. “Nessa, please stop. Just hear me out.”
“You mean give you the chance to explain when you’ve lied to me for over a decade. Did you just want me because he did? Like I was some sort of trophy? Everything was always a competition between you.”
She hooks her bra and wraps the dress around her, jerking the belt. “No wonder he…”
“No wonder he what? No wonder he kissed you?” I can’t lose her again but here we are. “Vanessa, can we take one step at a time? Let me start at the beginning, and we’ll work our way through this.”
“You’ve had fourteen fucking years to tell me the truth and eight to listen to mine.”
She grabs her phone and calls someone. “Please pick me up at Beau’s.” There’s a pause. “I don’t know where he lives.” She turns her raging glare on me.
“Vanessa, don’t go.”
“Where. The. Hell. Am I? Where Should Mr. Taylor pick me up?” she asks through gritted teeth.
I rub my forehead with my fingers before my arm collapses to my side. “The old Bell place.”
Her eyes fall. It takes her a minute to find her voice. “The old Bell place,” she tells her driver, averting my gaze. “You bought the place where we used to…”
“I did.”
She growls. “Why? You didn’t want me, and you made it clear. So why?”
“I’ve always wanted you. That has never changed. Nessa, stay and talk.” I drop my head into her neck. “Please, we’ve wasted too much time.”
The weight of my words softens her posture, but she shrugs away. “I need some time by myself. My house is safe, right?”
I pull jeans out of the drawer and step into them. If she races out of here, I want to be able to follow. I push all four buttons through the denim, then stand with my hands shoved deep into the pockets. “Yes.”
Vanessa doesn’t notice me closing the gap between us. Her gaze is locked on my bare chest. When my fingers intertwine with hers she lifts her head, and inch by torturous inch, she looks up until her eyes meet mine.
There is so much to say, and yet neither of us says a word. My heart constricts while waiting for her to jerk away or slap me with her other hand.
She doesn’t.
My other hand caresses the column of her neck. “Whether or not I wrote the note when we were twelve years old doesn’t matter. What matters is that I have loved you since that very day. Not for one single day did I stop loving you.”
Her lids fall as she leans into my hand, she expels a long breath. “You have no idea what you’ve done.” She kisses my palm and strides out of the bedroom.
