Cross your Heart

by Haley Jenner

  I can read between the invisible lines of that statement. I’m no longer that person for her. A flash of pain courses through my veins, a flicker of jealousy that I can’t school quick enough dancing in my eyes.

  “Are you into him?” I ask, shocking myself with the bite in my question.

  “That’s not really any of your business,” she nips back.

  I swallow my animosity, confusion settling within me at my need to know the answer. She evaded the question. Purposefully, and it sets me on edge for reasons I have no idea how to navigate or even understand.

  We stare at one another, our pride crackling between us like the beginnings of a bonfire; sparking, readying itself to take flight.

  “I’m sorry for saying you were a PR nightmare.” I drop down onto her couch, a beaten sound of regret following my apology.

  “It’s not untrue,” she attempts to ease my conscience, taking a seat across from me.

  There’s not much else to say, so I say nothing. Roxy knows the situation she’s gotten herself into, there’s no truth in me refuting it.

  “I’m sorry I blamed you for leaking it.”

  I feel the shame cross my features. I can see the doubt in her face, a part of her convinced that I did do it, that I sold her out for my own gain. But I see the hope in her eyes. The string of faith she’s clinging to, believing I’d never hurt her in that way.

  “You had every right to blame me. I’m so sorry, Roxy. I didn’t think he’d say anything… It was Baxter.”

  She blinks in shock, big, wide-eyed blinks. “Baxter?”

  “I told him one night after too much whiskey,” I confess. “Feeling sorry for myself after the Oscars; missing you, missing what we had, missing all the things we’d lost.”

  I watch as she places her beer bottle on the coffee table, fisting her hands in her lap to stop them from shaking. “You confided in a friend.”

  Rubbing a hand down my face roughly, I growl. I’m tired, worn down. Sick and tired of the people around me failing me.

  “He said he did it to build publicity for the movie,” I sigh. “He said he did it for me.”

  “Was he genuine?” she questions after a quiet beat. “When he told you that. Was he being honest?”

  I pause. “Yeah.”

  She shrugs. “Well, then you need to dig deep and decide whether you can offer forgiveness. But know, if you can’t, it’ll likely just cause you issue. Holding onto hate, to anger, it’s not healthy, Reid. I discovered that a long time ago.”

  I’m confused. I expected more anger, the fury that forced her way into my trailer this afternoon pointing her finger at me in accusation. “You’re not mad?”

  Inhaling deeply, she nods. “Of course, I’m mad, Reid. But I have to look at the bigger picture. Baxter didn’t do it to hurt me, he did it to give you something. Unfortunately, I was collateral, he just didn’t consider that.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I argue tiredly. “He betrayed my trust. I confided in him and he used it against me. I have to fire him.”

  “Was he paid for it?”

  “No.”

  “So he really thought he was doing it to help you. Any publicity is good publicity, right?”

  Taking a long pull of my beer, I say nothing.

  “You have to decide if there was malice in what he did. People make mistakes, Reid. Even you. It’s part of growing as a person.”

  I nod, eyes closing on a drained exhale. “How do you do it?” I query. “Forgiveness. It’s fucking hard.”

  “I thought about the friendship we’d shared. What you had brought to my life instead of what you’d ripped away from it.”

  “Me?” I ask incredulously, the exhaustion seeping into my body only moments ago disappearing in a split second. “What did I have to be forgiven for?”

  She stares at me in confusion. “You broke my heart. You walked away from our friendship.”

  I feel the flames of fury licking across my skin. My eyebrows pull together aggressively on my face, forcing me to glower. “If anyone needs to be forgiven, it’s you,” I accuse.

  “Excuse me?” she spits, her voice raising grotesquely.

  “You forced me into a corner,” I attack. “Our friendship couldn’t have pulled through all those years ago. It would have disintegrated before our very eyes. You did that by...” I flick a hand in front of my face, struggling to vocalize the shit swarming in my head.

  “Being honest,” she hedges. “I need to be forgiven for being honest?”

  I stop myself from speaking, her words causing a dent in my reinforced armor. I can feel the argument wane in my stare.

  “Maybe we’re both fuckwits,” I concede. “Maybe we both fucked it.”

  “Maybe,” she utters.

  “In all the years we were friends, I never remember us arguing like this,” I reflect, saddened by the reality.

  “Because we didn’t.”

  “Now it’s all we seem to do.”

  Dropping back into the couches we’re perched upon, we drink quietly, not sure what to say.

  “We’re not friends anymore,” she whispers. “We spent so long being able to read one another, we both likely expected that it was something we’d never lose. But I think we have to come to terms with the fact that the trust that was engrained into our friendship is gone. If we want it back, we need to earn it.”

  We’ve done nothing but prove that to one another since our paths became tangled once again. I didn’t trust her to say yes to my movie. She didn’t trust I was genuine in my want to have her involved. She believed I was capable of double-crossing her. A friendship once built on a solid foundation of trust had morphed into one spiked in its opposite. No matter how much time had passed, I expected to be able to know what she was thinking. But I don’t. She doesn’t trust me enough to let me in anymore. I hate it. I hate not knowing her the way I once did.

  “I don’t even know what we are,” she questions herself, tipping her neck back to swallow her beer.

  We aren’t friends, not like we were once upon a time. We’re a step above strangers, but even acquaintances doesn’t really fit. “Frie-quaintance.”

  “Huh?”

  “Not quite acquaintances, not entirely friends.”

  “Frie-quaintance,” she murmurs.

  “I don’t wanna fight with you, Roxy,” I sigh. “It makes me feel physically ill. I understand falling back into whatever we had isn’t possible. But truth is, I miss you, Firefly. Whether I wanted to admit it to myself or not, I missed you every day of the past ten years. Life doesn’t feel complete with you on the outskirts.”

  Thumb sliding into the neck of her bottle, she pops it in and out, the soft pop the only sound in the room.

  “I missed you too. There were so many moments I needed you.” She pauses, a quick intake of air filling her lungs before she looks at me. “I needed you, Reid. Not to survive,” she clarifies, not wanting to downplay her own strength. “But I needed you.”

  I look down, unable to meet the hurt in her eyes. I want to tell her I know how she felt. How I felt it too. That hopeless feeling of needing your best friend, that one person that you trust more than anyone else, only to find yourself more alone than ever. I refused to let myself believe that I needed her, because I didn’t deserve to need her. In a vulnerable moment, my best friend told me she loved me, and I returned the sentiment by telling her I hated her.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  She shrugs, not quite dismissing my apology, more accepting the hard truth of our demise. “It forced me to find hate in my heart for you,” she confesses. “I understood you a little more when I discovered that. It was heartbreaking to know that I could feel that for you. How does that happen? How do you love someone unconditionally and hate them in the same way?”

  I don’t have the answer. I’m as confused by my own feelings as she seems to be about hers.

  “Do you hate me? Still?”

  Her head shakes before I think she realize
s, a soft, “No,” breaking from her lips.

  “That’s a start.” I smile.

  She gives me one of her own without asking me the same question. Either she’s afraid that I’ll say yes, or worse, she doesn’t actually care.

  “How are you connecting with Beau as a character? Must be hard changing your entire perspective.”

  “Not really,” I answer. “Both Beau and Tanner are in love with Abbigail. Beau is just allowed to indulge his feelings. I think my advantage is knowing both characters intimately. The transition is easy enough.”

  “I’ve never done a sex scene before,” she admits quietly, bringing up tomorrow’s shoot.

  “It’s awkward. And cold. And the most frigidly unerotic moment you’ll experience.”

  Her cheeks shade.

  “Rox. You’ll be amazing. It’s acting. Don’t think about the intricacies of it too hard.”

  “Don’t think about your tongue on my nipple? Or your crotch rubbing against mine?”

  Scratching my neck, I feel it heat. “Yeah. Okay. It’ll be weird.”

  She laughs at my discomfort, the sound falling off easily.

  “What if it fucks my career, Reid?” She divulges her greatest fear, that obvious enough in the panicked way she swallows. “There’s so much bad publicity surrounding me all the time at the moment. What if this adds fuel to the fire? I turned another movie down recently because it had full-frontal nudity. The media responded well to that. Positioned it as me working to save my image, and now I’m doing it anyway. With my high school crush,” she quips, sarcastically. She doesn’t take a single breath, her words running together. “My agent advised me against this movie. But it was yours. Of course, I was going to take it. But I’m scared. This could be it, couldn’t it? The nail in the coffin of Roxy Monroe.”

  Unsure how else to help her, I stand, moving to the couch she’s sitting on, all the while her voice continues. Rattling off thoughts of a failed career.

  Taking her beer bottle, I slide it onto the table, holding her hand in mine. “Breathe.”

  She sucks in a gulp of air.

  “I just couldn’t handle it, Reid. Losing it all. Everything I’ve worked for. None of it was my fault,” she implores. “I mean. Of course, it was. Who else is to blame? No one. I’m such a fucking idiot.”

  “Stop.” I take hold of her face. Her eyes flick erratically, working their hardest not to focus on mine. “Look at me.”

  She does so, reluctantly.

  “You’re not going to fuck your career.”

  “Cross your heart?” she asks almost desperately.

  I can’t stop my smile. “Cross my heart,” I insist. “Where’s the girl that told me only days ago that what everyone else thinks doesn’t matter? That she knows the truth?”

  “That doesn’t help me get hired. You were right. I am a PR nightmare. I’m a disaster. Offers are few and far between these days.”

  “James is incredibly happy with you.”

  “He is?” She stops rambling, her voice soft and quiet.

  I laugh. “Rox, what have I always told you? You’re a fucking talent. James is seeing that first-hand. Stop trying to predict the future. Especially one that sees you failing.”

  She pushes her head forward, dropping it to my chest on an exhausted sigh. I let my hands wrap around her and she falls easily into the embrace.

  Our ability to be raw with one another was an olive branch of trust, the start of something new. We began kicking away the stone walls we’d unconsciously built against one another.

  She feels different in my arms. She’s no longer my Roxy. Not the way I remember her. As new, as unfamiliar as this feels, I can’t help but think it’s not exactly terrible. It’s our now and our now feels pretty fucking good.

  “Martin Vale won’t work with me.” She readjusts, dropping her head onto my knee, laying along the couch. I settle back, letting my hand rest over her waist.

  “Why?”

  I feel her throat move against my leg. “He asked me to audition for a film a few years back. When I wouldn’t sleep with him, he told me I wasn’t the right fit.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” My fist clenches.

  “You can’t be surprised,” she scolds. “Shit like that happens all the fucking time. Look at the movement happening around us, men are being axed left, right, and center because of poor conduct, sexual harassment, rape even.”

  I don’t trust myself to speak.

  “It’s not new. It was a mentality for so long. People are finally pushing against it. Doesn’t mean it won’t still happen or change the fact that it has.”

  “He spoke out in support of that movement,” I spit, anger splintering me on the inside.

  She lifts a shoulder in dismissal.

  “Why didn’t you call him out? Why didn’t you make yourself part of the movement?”

  She laughs. “After the sex scandal. Oh my fucking God, Reid. I would’ve been burned at the stake. I had to look at some form of preservation.”

  I can’t bring myself to ask. I can’t bring myself to utter the why.

  “Ask me,” she invites. “I can hear it screaming inside your head.”

  “How?” My voice cracks.

  “I was dating Damian Harrington,” she tells me, which I already knew. They dated for a few years. They seemed happy. Until they weren’t.

  “We were good for a few years. He’d go on tour, I’d be on location, we spent a lot of time apart. It was hard.”

  She shifts, rolling onto her back, gaze focused on the ceiling. “We were trying to stay connected. Six months without sex is a long time,” she declares. “We’d send each other videos, they were private. I’d delete them after I sent them and delete his after I watched them.”

  I shift uncomfortably, an unfamiliar pang hitting me in the chest of some douche seeing Roxy like that.

  “Why’d you break up?”

  “What didn’t he do?” She shrugs. “He cheated multiple times, with multiple women. He started to enjoy the drug scene a little too much for my liking. He was drinking all the time. We started fighting. It wasn’t fun anymore. It wasn’t us. He was a different person from who I fell in love with. Or maybe I never saw who he really was and just fell out of love with him.”

  Her eyes flick to mine, her head tipped back awkwardly. “Damian released the video, Reid. He was pissed when I ended our relationship. He knew it could ruin my career. His was derailing, he thought mine should too.”

  “And before you ask me why I didn’t call him out,” she stops me from speaking, reading my mind. “I have no proof. Throwing blame would only make me look like more of a fool.”

  Fourteen

  Take Two

  Reid

  I wake with a start, my eyes widening to focus on the room around me. My body aches, the pressure of another body pinning me to the unfamiliar couch, both hot and heavy. Tipping my chin down, I take in the mass of blonde hair decorating my chest, the tanned legs entwined with mine.

  Roxy murmurs something indecipherable in her sleep, readjusting to roll awkwardly on the couch. I shift at the same time, rolling her into the back of the lounge suite to remove myself.

  Standing, I stretch, working to stifle my yawn at the same time. Fuck. Reaching for the TV remote, I switch off the screen. We passed out watching some of our favorite movies. Just like old times. The copious amount of empty beer bottles, chip packets, and chocolate wrappers testament to our raging night.

  Glancing back at Roxy, I watch her stir, flipping onto her side to hug a cushion, only to settle into sleep once again.

  Still dressed in her jean shorts and shirt, her clothes are twisted uncomfortably in sleep. Shorts hiked higher than appropriate, the plump line of her ass cheeks sit bare for the roaming eye. Roaming eyes that most definitely shouldn’t be mine. But eyes trailing along her tanned thighs, I let myself appreciate how much her body has changed over the years. Gone is the straight up and down of an adolescent girl. Roxy Monroe i
s the perfect cocktail of slim and thick. Plump where it matters most. Shirt inched up her back, the indents of her lower spine are pressed into her skin like the perfect frame for the sway of her ass.

  Jesus.

  I look away, shaking my head to rid the thoughts that I shouldn’t be offering promise in my mind. It’s dangerous. I’m the worst kind of hypocrite. I shut Roxy out for thinking this exact same way years ago. Now, here I am, fantasizing about tasting her skin. Bruising the silk of her body with my lips and teeth.

  Roxy wasn’t bullshitting when she said that our before is no longer a thought we can reason as a possibility. Our relationship has changed. That’s something my mind and body can both agree on.

  What we shared once upon a time was perfect for what we needed at that point in our lives. We supported one another through our adolescent years. A time we can both look upon fondly without regret. But now, that relationship is one neither of us needs. We’ve proven that by surviving without one another for this long.

  It’s the want that’s changed.

  I want Roxy Monroe in my life. I just don’t know in what capacity. Harder to stomach is the possibility that Roxy might not want me as a solid fixture in hers. That thought alone is enough to scare the shit out of me. I walked away from her once, I couldn’t force myself to do it again. I won’t even consider what having to watch her walk away from me would do to me.

  Like I said. I’m a hypocrite. But I’ve never claimed to be anything other than a selfish asshole.

  My cell vibrates against the coffee table, echoing loudly across the room. Grateful for the distraction of my depressing thoughts, I answer it, speaking quietly to not wake Roxy.

  “Rivere.” I wander into the bathroom, closing the door softly behind me.

  “It’s James.”

  I smile at the mess. Snippets of my Roxy cracking through bit by bit. She wasn’t lying when she said the lounge was the only semi-tidy room of the apartment she’s housed in. The bathroom is a fucking bombsite.