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I carefully took his phone in my hand, hating how heavy and fancy it was. The one he’d had back in college was always scratched or dented, usually hanging on by a thread.
I was expecting a picture of Henna to be his screensaver, but it wasn’t. It looked like a picture of him at the top of some mountain, but no girl was present. A strange relief settled inside me upon seeing it.
I pressed the contact tab, and the relief was suddenly ripped away upon seeing how many female names were programmed.Samantha: winter,Lydia:fall,Jasmine: FL Lights premiere,Henna: West Coast/summer…the list went on and on, and my stomach churned at the realization that the boy I used to love had grown into a man who saved women in his phone according to what seemed like the season in which he saw them.
Or, if I was honest with that dark part of my brain that was putting all the pieces together, they were organized by the season in which he decided to fuck them.
They were seasonal fuck-buddies.
Gulping, I tapped on the icon to create a new contact and put in my information. I saved my name asBexley Black: college fling.
Handing the phone back to him, I wiped my palms on my shorts, trying to get the feel of his life off me. It wasn’t that I was judging him, I just…I was insanely jealous. It wasn’t one woman he’d decided to see after me; it was an entire harem he’d decided to dick around with. For some reason, that made my heart throb with pain.
Ryan grabbed the phone, inspecting the information I’d put in, and his face fell as a mirthless laugh escaped that impressively sculpted chest of his.
“Really, Bex? College fling? You think you’d need a label like that in my phone for me to remember you?” His eyes glittered with hurt I hadn’t intended on delivering. Why did he look so upset? Why did his voice sound like it’d tipped just slightly like Cole’s did when he got upset?
“I didn’t want to assume you’d remember me…seemed like you had an easy enough time forgetting me these last ten years.” My stupid, thoughtless mouth delivered the statement while my brain was screaming at me to take it back.
A furious rage replaced that glittering hurt. Anger, offense—god, whatever else I’d left this man with—surfaced, threatening to burn me to ash where I stood. How could I be so thoughtless? I had been the one to leave, not the other way around.
I had ruined us, yet here I was blaming him for not coming after me.
Shame simmered, burning my chest, stretching up my neck, to my jaw.
“Yeah…you’re right, it was easy.” The man I’d left scoffed, pushing past me, leaving me all alone behind the fake wall with the sound of tennis balls slamming against it.
