“You didn’t text me back,” he says gruffly. He looks over at Brooke who is glaring at him and he gives her a charming smile. “Sorry Brooke, need a minute with my woman. Been too long since I last kissed her.”
He carries me back toward the kitchen and backs me up against the wall.
“You just saved me from punching that broad,” I whisper, nodding my head in the direction of where Alice is standing, staring at us with a bewildered and slightly miffed glare. Seth sneaks a peek and then gives me a cocky half smile.
“That annoying bitch? Damn…. I should have been quieter. What’d she do?” He trails his nose up my neck and into my hair.
“She was asking about you,” I say simply. His head comes up and he grins perceptively. He gets me. I love him so much.
He leans in and captures my mouth with his, pulling my lip between his. His hand cups my face while his mouth shows me that he really has been missing me since he kissed me goodbye this morning. I feel calm when Seth’s around. He’s able to take away all my fears and anger with a simple touch. Our tongues meld into each other, and I wish we were someplace else so he could fulfill another craving of mine.
But we’re not, which is obvious when I hear a throat clearing loudly next to us.
“Ok that’s enough, Seth. Give me my best friend back,” Brooke says, crossing her arms over chest.
“She was my best friend first,” he says, putting my feet back on the ground. I smack his shoulder.
“Leave her alone.”
“Well it’s true,” he mutters. “Was on my way over to hang out with your future hubby, and I needed a Josie fix.”
“Well your future wifey is here for me today, so get goin’,” she says pointing to the front door.
“Geesh… pregnant’s moodier than PMS. Josie’s going to be a raging bitch when she and I have a baby,” he jokes, walking up to Brooke and giving her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Wifey? Baby? What the fuck?
“And I won’t help unless you give me my friend back,” Brooke says.
“I’m goin’. I’m goin’… I love you, Josie Sommers,” he says loudly, backing away from me with his arms spread wide. He bumps into Alice, and laughs when she stumbles slightly. He looks back at me with exaggerated wide eyes, and I hold back a laugh.
“I love you too, Seth Montgomery!” I holler back.
“Move in with me!” he shouts in the middle of the room. I walk into the living room and smile at him. Everyone is glaring at his frivolous behavior, but I fall in love with him even more as I watch him.
“Get out!” I say, instead of answering his question.
He stops in his tracks and gives me a mischievous grin. “Not until you agree to move in with me.”
“I’m already living with you.”
“Make it official, Pussy Cat. Say yes.”
There’s no doubt in my mind that I want this man for as long as he will have me. I love him more than I thought I could ever love another person, and I don’t relish the thought of living another moment without him. We’ve wasted too much time as it is. I see the way he looks at me, and I know he feels the same way about me. So I do something I’m not really used to doing. I trust that he and I have what it takes to make it, and I let go of my fears.
“Yes,” I respond, grinning at the elated and victorious smile on his face. He glances over at Brooke, who’s standing next to me staring at our exchange with a smile and tears in her eyes. She really is extremely emotional.
“Sorry, Brooke. Just one more kiss,” he says, wrapping me in his arms and kissing me with abandon. I giggle against his mouth, and feel so much warmth and pleasure starting in the pit of my stomach and working its way through my veins. “I love you so fucking much, Jos,” he says softly and pulls back.
“I love you too, Seth.” I swat his butt and push on his back. “I’ll see you later. Go!”
I miss him as soon as he closes that door. What the hell is wrong with me? Everyone goes back to their conversations, and my heart aches. I want to be with him. Brooke wraps her arm around my waist, and leans her head against my shoulder.
“You two are good together. I’m sorry I didn’t see it at first,” she says. I look at her, and raise my eyebrows.
“Don’t even pretend, Brooke. You’re the one who took us to that bar to try to make something happen.”
She grins. “Well it worked…”
I laugh and squeeze her. “How’re you and Brandon doing? How’s the wedding planning?”
“It’s stressful.” She grabs a chair and sits down in it. I sit down next to her. “We bicker all the time, but he loves me. He puts my shoes on for me every day. He gives me baths and paints my nails. He cooks and cleans. He’s perfect, and I still bitch at him.”
“You’re pregnant, Brooke. He understands.”
“I know… I just feel bad for him, sometimes. Ugh, I can’t wait ‘til this is over with. I just want my baby here, and then get married. I’m half tempted to elope.”
I shrug my shoulders. Not a bad idea. I stopped dreaming about a wedding when I grew up because I realized it wasn’t something I really wanted. To get married when my dads couldn’t, makes me sad. I was content with the idea of just finding someone I fell in love with.
She barks out a laugh and slaps her knee. “Yeah right. Who am I kidding? I want the whole shenanigan!” I laugh at her word choice, and she joins in. She stops abruptly and holds onto her stomach, eyes wide.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, worried. Please don’t have that baby at this baby shower! She looks up at me, smiles, and grabs my hand.
“He’s kicking really hard. Feel…” She places my hand on the side of her stomach and presses on it so I feel my hand pushing against a mass inside of her. The thing pushes back on my hand, and I gasp. “Feel that?” she whispers. She moves my hand to the other side of her stomach where I can feel some more prodding.
My throat clogs with pain, and my chest heaves, trying to catch a breath. The guilt is overbearing. To feel what my baby would have become if I hadn’t terminated the pregnancy, makes my heart hurt.
How am I going to survive this day?
Chapter 22
Seth
I send Brandon a text to let him know I’ll be there in five minutes, and take off toward his house.
Brandon: Go ahead in the house when you get there
Josie said yes to moving in with me. Maybe it was a little coerced, but I know her well enough to know that she wouldn’t have said it if she didn’t mean it. She’s gaining more confidence in our relationship every day.
I pull into Brandon’s driveway, and lean my head against the headrest. I had almost given up on the thought of having Josie as mine. I’d begun to think we were never going to get past pretending we were only best friends, but nothing could be better than what I’m feeling right now.
I walk to the front door, and get another text from Brandon.
Brandon: Wait…. I’ll be there in five. Wait in the car.
I’m already in the house, so I ignore it, but I soon find out why he was trying to get me to wait. So, I didn’t think anything could ruin my mood, but seeing Blake definitely makes my blood simmer. He looks up from the papers he’s looking at in his hands, and I see the same hatred I feel for him mirrored back at me.
Fuck this guy.
Blake’s been a douche since Josie met him. We were on the same soccer team, but we never talked or paid attention to each other until the night of the party when Josie and Blake talked. The next day at practice, he was a dick from the minute it started. He was captain, so being around him was inevitable, but then he started making me run extra laps and do extra exercises.
Josie seemed to be into him, so I never said anything at first. She deserved to be happy, and at that time, I didn’t realize she had feelings for me. I was so fucking stupid. I should’ve come out with it that summer, but instead I let her go, and she went right into this prick’s arms.
It always boggled my mind how Josie could
just ignore my clear distaste for the guy. She acted like I felt nothing for her, insinuating that I should try to go sleep with other women and actually feel something. She acted like my heart didn’t explode every time she was around, and that she wasn’t crushing it by being with another man.
I was devastated not only for the fact that he wanted my girl, but because he was an asshole. Toward the end of the season, he and Josie had been dating a couple of months, and I was fucking fed up with his bullshit and called him out for it on the field. I hated the way he bragged about her hot body and how he was so close to fucking her, so I went up to him, shoved him, and told him to shut the fuck up. One of the players got in the way before it escalated to more than just shoving, but we made it clear that we were never going to be okay.
I tried to stay away. I couldn’t handle watching them make out, and Blake knew it. He knew there was something between Josie and me, and he worked hard to steer her attention away from it. On the night of Josie’s twenty first birthday party, he fingered her in the backseat of my truck, as a way to get back at me. He couldn’t get away with getting in a fist fight with me, so he fought by taking the girl he knew I wanted. Her eyes were closed, so she didn’t see the sardonic smirk Blake sent my way when he caught me glaring.
Seeing that broke something in me. I knew where their relationship was going, and my heart hurt. I wanted to strangle him. I still didn’t feel like she loved him, though. It seemed more like she was infatuated with him and the thought of being cared about and loved by someone. He was nice to her- he liked her nerdiness and he thought she was pretty. All the things she wanted to feel. I get it, but I hated that she didn’t see that I could have offered her more than that.
I tried to take a chance at the hospital and kiss her. I wanted her to know I needed her- that she was meant to be with me. But Blake called and broke up the moment, and another slice of my heart fractured. She reacted and she wanted me. I saw it in her eyes, but she still fought it. After clearing her head, she came back out with a new wall intact. She wouldn’t cheat on her boyfriend, and she wasn’t going to break up with him for something she wasn’t sure about with me. I couldn’t even look at her without feeling pain. My dad almost died, and the girl I wanted officially blocked me out.
When they came to the hospital the next day, I saw a difference in her. She’d done the thing I dreaded most. She told some other guy that she loved him, and she slept with him. I just knew. I know Josie more than she knows herself. And fucking hearing him whisper it to her with me behind them made my skin crawl. I wanted to fucking murder him. But Josie looked happy, and that’s all I wanted. After they left, I grabbed the first hot nurse I saw and fucked her in the storage closet. It was a way to escape my misery. My chest, heart, and soul agonized too much.
It was nice to have an excuse to stay away from them. I helped my dad a lot, and I focused on working on my career as a photographer. While I wasn’t paying attention, her relationship with Blake was getting worse. She was sad that summer, but all I could think about was how she told another guy that she loved him. That fucking hurt. I wanted her, but I didn’t want to be second best.
When she needed me again, a part of me knew I was only going to get hurt. She wasn’t coming to me because she realized she loved me. She was coming to me because she wanted to feel loved again. Which I did, I loved her beyond words. She just didn’t realize how deep my feelings for her ran. Every kiss and caress made me fall harder. She was it for me. She was the one I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I just knew.
When I took those pictures, I was so wrapped up in the moment, and I told her I loved her. She looked like she was about to have a panic attack and every second she freaked instead of responding was another knife in my heart. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t handle the pain in my chest. I reassured her that things would go back to normal, and I left. The last thing I wanted was to lose my best friend because I was in love with her.
We stayed friends, but not a day went by that I didn’t think about her being mine. And not a night passed that I didn’t wish she was wrapped around me instead of some slut I brought back from a party. Then that winter Brandon came and told me Blake and Josie made up. Brandon sympathized with me because he was the only one who knew how I felt about Josie besides Josie’s and my parents, and he wanted to make sure I found out from him before Blake started rubbing it in my face.
It didn’t matter who I heard it from. I found Blake as soon as I could, and punched him. He fought back that time, but Brandon grabbed me before I could get anything worse in on him.
“You don’t fucking deserve her! Why the fuck are you back?” I spat at him.
“I may not deserve her, but I want her.”
“She’s more than a piece of fucking property. She’s so much fucking more.”
He smiled scathingly. “Oh I know. And I also know that she doesn’t have those same thoughts about you. She keeps coming back to me for a reason, Seth. Open your damn eyes. She doesn’t love you.”
“Fuck you.” I tried lunging for him again, but Brandon pushed me away. I turned to the side to tear into Brandon too, when Blake came up and punched me in the eye.
Fucking prick bruised my eye. I couldn’t be around Josie for a week after. I didn’t want her to worry about me getting in fights, so I fumed for days. I wanted to ruin him. Josie’s not the type of girl to listen to bullshit without evidence. She wouldn’t believe me if I came to her and told her about him. I made my disdain clear, but she still stayed with him.
When he walked in on me kissing Josie all over her face when I told her about me getting a showcase in the art gallery, I could feel his anger across the room. And I loved every fucking second of it. It may have been the first time in a while that he realized he had something to worry about.
I fucking hate the guy.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, clenching his jaw.
“Waiting for Brandon.” I stand on the opposite side of the room, cross my arms, and glare at him. Figures he’d come around and ruin my mood.
“Okay.” He nods, and looks back down at his papers. “How’s Josie?”
I grit my teeth, not liking her name coming out of his mouth at all.
“Happy.” He looks up, but doesn’t give anything away in his expression. “You don’t get to ask questions about her. You’ve got everyone tricked around here. They all think you were a drunken idiot that night, spilling out Josie’s personal business like that. But you don’t have me fooled.”
He sits back in his chair and I see his mouth twitch. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I fucking know how you work. You’re calm and calculating, you don’t just fly off the handle like that. That was all a ploy to hurt her. So you don’t get to sit there and act like you care how she’s doing, because we both know you’re hoping she’s hurting.”
He gets up out of his chair and stands in the middle of the room, veins bulging in his neck.
“You don’t think I have a right to be mad? To want her to hurt?”
“No, I don’t think you do. There’s never a reason to call her names or announce to a room of people that she had an abortion. You’re a fucking dick.”
“Careful, Seth. You’re lucky I didn’t call the cops on you that night.” I walk closer to him, anger motivating every step.
“I would love to go to jail with your blood on my hands. But you wouldn’t call the cops, because you know you deserved it. That’s another thing. You act like you’re the goddamn victim, but we both know that you deserved every ounce of blood I made you bleed.”
“She killed my child, she deserves to hurt.”
“She killed nothing!” I bellow. I’m sick of hearing those words come from her mouth, and I sure as hell won’t listen to him accuse her of that.
“You don’t get it because she didn’t take away your child, she took away mine! She was selfish.”
“You need to stop talking about her right now, or this is going to
be a repeat of last time,” I say forebodingly. He’s pissing me the fuck off.
He smirks at me again and cocks his head to the side. “How’s it feel to get my sloppy seconds?” he asks, mockingly.
“I had her first, so I think you’ve got that wrong.” I take another step toward him, and he takes a step back.
“Yeah, but she didn’t choose you. She chose me. How does it feel to know you’ll always be second best?” He lets out a humorless laugh and continues to piss me off. “It was funny, because I knew you put those pictures up on purpose, and you really thought she would pick you.”
I didn’t care if he recognized the pictures or not. He would either keep quiet about it and fume over the fact that I had been with his girl, or he would confront her and make her choose. I thought she would want me.
“I let you have her. I chose to let her try to be happy and I let her go.” Yeah, I was fucking hurt and devastated and heartbroken, but I couldn’t be around her after that. “I even texted you to go get her after I left, so she wasn’t alone. I let you have her! And you fucking hurt her!” My fists clench as the anger about what had happened comes rushing back. He’s got a smug look on his face, showing no remorse or sympathy for her or my pain. That’s okay. He’ll feel it.
“Yes, you did leave. You can thank me for that position in Europe. It’s been very beneficial to have contacts all around the globe,” he says, smirk still intact. I don’t let him in on my surprise. He thinks he’ll win this showdown. I smile back at him.
“Sure! Thank you, Blake, for setting me up with a career to take care of Josie for the rest of my life.” A tick in his jaw. Finally got to him. “And while we’re talking about that, let’s bring up all these other great things I have going for me and Josie.” I continue to walk toward him, while he walks back. He’s an inch taller than me and broader, but he knows I can take him. “Why’d you work so hard to get me away in the first place, Blake? Josie told me how you two didn’t live with each other. You only came by a few days a week to stay with her, even though you worked only thirty minutes away… Why not stay with her every night?”
That's a Lie Page 23
