Before You

by Lisa Cardiff

  “I talked to Mia a couple days ago, and she won’t say a damn thing to Bre. Besides, she knows Bre would never believe a word out of her mouth.”

  Jax laughed. “If you say so. Do what you want, but to be clear, I’m done being used as a buffer in this fucked up mess. Don’t call me to hang out with Bre while you make a booty call or because you’re off on some cozy weekend with another of your bimbos.”

  “I know you don’t want to babysit her, and you’re probably mentally counting down the seconds until you can get rid of her, but you’re the only person I can trust. Marc or Alec probably would slip up and say something stupid or worse. You won’t.”

  “Jesus, Cam. That’s all kinds of fucked up. Being with Bre isn’t a chore. I’m just done being an accomplice to your lies. I don’t want to run interference anymore when some girl you discarded shows up when Bre’s around.”

  “Okay. Just help me this weekend while she’s here and I won’t ask you again,” Cam pleaded.

  “Absolutely not,” Jax snapped, slamming his drink on the bar counter.

  “Don’t leave me hanging. Bre tried to break up with me, and I need everything to go smoothly while she’s here. I need to win her back. This is the last time. I promise I’ll figure out something.”

  “What? You can’t bring yourself to spend four days with her without running off with some other woman?” Cheating on Bre had become a way of life for Cam. It was who he was, so ingrained in his nature that Jax actually wondered whether Cam believed he was doing anything wrong. Everyone else could see Cam for who he was. It was a shame that Bre refused to see the truth. Disgusted, Jax abruptly stood up, shoving his barstool back with enough force to knock it over.

  “When I sent Bre the plane ticket, I already had plans with Anna on Thursday night. I can’t cancel. Can you imagine what kind of scene she would make?” Cam shuddered in mock horror and then laughed.

  “Right, and you wouldn’t want to miss a night with that manipulative bitch while the girl you claim to want to marry is in town. Don’t ask me to do this again and don’t even consider involving Marc or Alec in your schemes. I’m out of here. I can’t listen to this bullshit. What time do I need to pick up Bre at the airport tomorrow?”

  “No need. She’s renting her own car. She didn’t want to bother you.”

  Jax flinched. That hurt. Bre couldn’t even stand the thought of being in the same car with him. He just hoped she didn’t try to avoid seeing him the entire weekend. He still wanted to talk to her about what happened last weekend now that they’d both had some time to cool down and reflect. He understood that she felt guilty about betraying Cam, but if she knew the real Cam or the person Cam had become, she wouldn’t have to waste her time fearing she ruined her relationship. Cam ruined it a long time ago.

  Part of him wished he could tell her every detail of Cam’s indiscretions, but he never would. Based on what happened between them last weekend, she probably wouldn’t believe anything he said about Cam anyway. She was blind when it came to Cam, never doubting one of his excuses, never questioning why he left her at every possible opportunity. Her blind faith became increasingly difficult to witness.

  When she freaked out the morning when they woke up together, Jax’s first reaction was anger. She certainly didn’t resist him the night before. In fact, when he tried to push her away, she wouldn’t stop pressuring him—not that he put up much of a fight.

  On the flight back to LA last weekend, he couldn’t get Bre out of his thoughts. She told him that what they did was hurtful, not just to Cam, but all of them. She was right, except he was pretty sure he would suffer the most. Barring total exposure of Cam’s infidelities, she would never leave him. Sure, she said they broke up, but Cam clearly didn’t believe it. For him, watching her with Cam would be similar to experiencing a slow, painful death. If knowing that Cam didn’t treasure or appreciate her bothered him before, now it would kill him.

  Bre was the girl for him. He knew it with absolute certainty. Never had he felt about a woman the way he felt about Bre. It almost scared him. The thought of continuing to fill his life with mindless encounters after being with Bre left an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach. More than anything, he wanted Bre to be happy, and if she thought that Cam made her happy, he had no other option but to let her go. He wouldn’t be happy about it, though.

  Getting into the back of the cab, he gave the driver his address and sent Bre a text.

  Cam said you didn’t want me to pick you up tomorrow. I hope that doesn’t mean you’re avoiding me. I want to talk. I don’t want things to be awkward between us.

  Jax bounced his leg up and down as he waited for Bre to respond. As the minutes ticked by without a response, his emotions swung between irritation and rejection and hope. Disgusted with himself because his actions resembled an adolescent boy experiencing his first crush, he wished he could find the strength of character to toss his phone out the window. Instead, he stared at his phone as though he could make her respond by sheer force of will. A smile spread across his face when he heard the sound indicating the arrival of a new text.

  Neither do I. Let’s give each other some space so we can reset the boundaries between us.

  Jax sighed. He had no intention of resetting the boundaries.

  No. We need to talk. Let me pick you up. We should see each other before you see Cam so we can figure this out. It will be easier that way.

  The minutes stretched without a response from Bre, and he almost called her, but the taxi pulled in front of his house, and he shoved his phone into his pocket. He’d left his car parked outside the bar. After the number of drinks he downed while he watched Cam grope Anna as if it were his job, he wasn’t in any condition to drive.

  The minute he walked through the front door of his house, he shrugged off his jacket and dropped onto his couch, his long, lean legs sprawled out in front of him. He turned on the T.V. and absently scrolled through the channels until her couldn’t wait one more minute. Apprehensively, he pulled his phone out of his pocket, checking for a response from Bre. Nothing.

  That pissed him off even more than her rejection the other morning. She was avoiding him. What a joke. He understood that she was confused, but ignoring the issue of what happened between them wouldn’t make it magically disappear. It would make both of them uncomfortable and on edge when they were in the same room.

  Without hesitating, he pressed the send button on his phone to call her. She answered immediately.

  “Hey, Jax,” she said, her voice low and conciliatory.

  “Bre, don’t avoid me,” Jax said, clutching the phone next to his ear.

  “It wasn’t my intention. I planned to respond, but I was still thinking about what you said.”

  “And what did you decide?” he asked, twisting the black leather band on his wrist.

  “You’re right.”

  “Does that mean you want me to pick you up tomorrow night?”

  “Yes. I think we should talk.”

  Her voice was so soft Jax could barely hear her. He could tell she was still uneasy about what happened between them. “I’ll be waiting in the pick up area.”

  Bre didn’t reply, and Jax didn’t say anything else. It seemed as if several minutes passed while he listened to the sound of her breathing lightly into the phone. The sound soothed him like nothing else he remembered for a long time.

  “Jax,” she whispered. “Are you still there?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “I don’t want to lose you. You’re important to me. I know we haven’t known each other for a long time, but you’re one of my closest friends. I love you. I can’t imagine not having you in my life.”

  Her words felt like both a balm for his soul and a knife twisting in his gut.

  He sighed. “You’re important to me too, Bre.” He could hear her moving around the room and he wished he could see her, hold her.

  “And Jax?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks for
asking Sara to display my artwork. I sold two pieces. It was amazing.”

  “I’m glad. You deserve it. See you tomorrow, sweetie.”

  “Bye.”

  Hanging up, he tossed his phone on the leather ottoman near his feet. This was going to be a long weekend for more than one reason. The thought of being so near to her without being able to touch her would make him crazy, and even worse than not being able to touch her would be watching Cam touch her. The thought of Cam holding Bre’s hand or kissing her made his hands twitch with the urge to hit something.

  He respected Cam as a musician and as a friend, but Cam didn’t deserve Bre’s devotion. The way she put Cam on a pedestal as if he couldn’t do anything wrong frustrated him. He didn’t understand why Bre didn’t think she was good enough for Cam. She always told everyone how lucky she was to be with Cam, that Cam was the best boyfriend anyone could imagine. In his opinion, fortune smiled on Cam the day Bre walked into his life, not the other way around. For some unfathomable reason, Bre didn’t see if that way. Apparently, she decided years ago that she needed Cam in her life, and she refused to heed any logic to the contrary.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  After her phone conversation with Jax, she twirled her paintbrush between her thumb and index finger, focusing on the painting she had been working on all night as a way to occupy her thoughts. It wasn’t her typical whimsical landscape. The colors were deep and heavy with slashing paint strokes, much more passionate and alive than her other work. Unsure whether she liked it or not, she took it off her easel and leaned it against the wall. With all but one of her paintings selling at the opening, both Sara and Michael were pushing her to display more of her work. She loved painting, but she still wasn’t sure how much of her art she wanted to sell or if she wanted to pursue a career as an artist. She didn’t need to decide the future of her art career today, but she did need to finish packing for her trip tomorrow, and it was well past midnight already.

  Hopefully, Cam didn’t have plans to drag her from party to party in LA. She wanted to relax after the chaos of opening her gallery. Maybe if everything went well, she and Cam would figure out where there relationship stood, even if it meant they could only be friends, but to do that, they needed time alone. Cam may not agree, but she desperately wanted to remember why she loved Cam so much. Theoretically, she knew there were plenty things about Cam she loved, his wavy blond hair, his love of music, his blue eyes that sparkled when he was excited, his smell, so familiar she equated it to security, but the list was admittedly becoming more superficial the longer they dated.

  In fact, she couldn’t remember what she liked about the two of them together, as a couple. When she reflected on their relationship, the best memories of the two of them were as kids or their senior year in high school. Since then, everything felt almost forced, held together by the fragile threads of a shared history.

  Luggage trailing behind her, Bre walked out of the sliding glass doors of the airport into the haze-filled California sunshine. The balmy air caressed her skin, and she drew in a contented sigh. The winter in Carbondale, Colorado had already started, and despite the fact that she absolutely loved living in the mountains and being part of a small community, she admittedly enjoyed the warm weather and humidity of Southern California.

  Most of the people she passed in the airport were dressed in short sleeves and either a skirt or shorts, except the businessmen, who looked overheated and out of place in their business suits and ties.

  A moment later Jax pulled up next to the curb in front of her. As he jumped out of the car, she noticed his familiar smile and she found herself smiling back at him. Jax had one of the most dangerous smiles she had ever seen. Dangerous in the sense that his smile was too sexy to be real. She couldn’t stop herself from staring at his lips, remembering the way they felt as they brushed against her lips, her skin, and the whispered praise he showered on her with those same lips while he touched every inch of her body.

  Groaning internally at the direction of her thoughts, she acknowledged this was going to be a long weekend if she couldn’t control them. She mentally slammed the door on those memories and walked toward his car.

  Almost immediately, Jax wrapped her in a friendly embrace that felt decidedly intimate, given their recent history, and she abruptly realized that letting Jax pick her up and spending a half an hour alone with him wasn’t a good decision.

  “Bre. You look beautiful today. Get in and I’ll put your luggage in the trunk.”

  “Ahh… thanks,” she mumbled almost incoherently. The sound of his deep voice and the blatant admiration in his eyes did amazing things to her previously relaxed demeanor. Bre watched Jax put her luggage in the trunk, then she slid into the front passenger seat of the car. Nervously, she searched through the contents of her purse, not looking for anything in particular, but trying to avoid making eye contact with Jax.

  “Bre, relax. It’s just me,” Jax said, pushing her long brown hair behind her ear and letting his hand fall on her leg just above her knee.

  “I’m fine, Jax. I wish you wouldn’t touch me like that, though. It makes me uncomfortable,” Bre replied with an overly bright smile. The awareness between the two of them was so strong she could almost feel it crackling in the air, reminding her of every shared touch last weekend.

  “What do you mean?” Jax said as he pulled away from the curb.

  “Don’t be obtuse. You can’t touch me like that,” Bre responded, rubbing lip balm on her lips to keep her hands busy.

  “Why? You never complained about a hug or a touch before,” he said, his eyes narrowed.

  “That was before… you know. It’s different now,” Bre whispered, pushing his hand off her leg.

  A slow grin spread across his face, his gray eyes dancing with amusement. “Not entirely. We agreed to be friends and forget what happened. That’s what I’m doing.”

  Bre sighed. “Yes, we’re friends, but we can’t act like before. That’s why we’re in this mess right now. It’s kills me to think about what we did to Cam. I wish I could scrub it from my brain.”

  “Do you really mean that? You regret what happened.”

  “Of course I regret it—every second of it. It was the biggest mistake of my life.”

  “Really, that’s it? That’s how you feel? It’s as simple as that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why did it happen?”

  “I don’t know. I had a moment of weakness and you were there, and I… wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  “So, I could have been anybody. You would have hooked up with any man that paid you any attention. I just happened to be in the right, or wrong, depending how you look at it, place at the right time?” he asked indignantly, his gray eyes piercing her.

  “Yes… I mean no. Oh hell, I don’t know why it happened. It just did and I’m sorry. My behavior was wrong on so many levels.”

  “So that’s it. You don’t feel anything for me?”

  “Other than friendship, no, nothing.” At that moment if someone told her that lying could cause you physical pain, she would have totally agreed. Those words sliced through her body like a surgeon with a scalpel, systematically carving pieces of her heart.

  “So you basically want to pretend it never happened?” Jax questioned, his eyes suddenly cold and unforgiving.

  “That’s what we agreed, right?”

  Jax sighed and ran his hands through his thick hair. Bre watched, almost hypnotized by his movements. Her hand itched to touch him, feel his skin and his hair. The world around her—the cars weaving in and out of the heavy highway traffic, Cam waiting for her arrival—vanished. It was just the two of them cocooned in Jax’s car and an overwhelming desire for Jax, someone she could never have, wrapped around her like a melancholy blanket.

  “Listen, Bre,” he said, his voice low and gravelly. “I know it’s complicated and uncomfortable, but there has never been another time in my life when being with someone felt so right or so good that
I didn’t care about the consequences.” He grabbed her hand, his calloused thumb moving in a comforting circular motion on the inside of her wrist. “Call Cam. Tell him you changed your mind or that something came up at the gallery, and spend the weekend with me. We’ll get a hotel together for the weekend and explore what’s between us and then when it’s over we’ll decide what we want to do about Cam.”

  Stunned, Bre could hardly answer. She had dated Cam for so long, it felt strange and at the same time thrilling to be propositioned. But the thing that absolutely left her breathless and disoriented was that she was totally and overwhelmingly tempted to accept his insane proposal. “Jax, I can’t believe you said that. I can’t cancel on Cam now that I’m already here.”

  Jax exhaled slowly. “Why not? He’s cancelled last minute plenty of times, and he’ll do it again. To Cam, you will never be a priority, at least not anytime soon.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Cam with you. It feels wrong. He made me a priority by flying me here this weekend.”

  “If you’re a priority, he would pick you up at the airport and take you out for a romantic evening. You’ll be lucky of Cam spends more than two hours alone with you without something or someone drawing his attention away. Forget Cam, this about us.”

  She immediately scoffed. “There could never be an us. The idea is utterly ridiculous.”

  “The only thing that’s ridiculous is trying to ignore what’s between us,” Jax responded.

  “No, Jax. Even though Cam and I broke up, he’s still my best friend, and honestly, I came here to see if Cam and I can salvage things.” Her voice quivered, and she wanted to kick herself for failing to be firm.

  His jaw twitched. “So that’s it. After that whole speech about him not being what you needed, you’re getting back together with him. ”

  “I didn’t say that,” she responded, shifting uncomfortably in her seat.