by K. A. Linde
Hayden and Liz crashed back into the house several hours later, tipsy from the wine that had been flowing all night, and drunk on the energy of the evening. Victoria and Daniel had stayed at the banquet, since Victoria won the Senior Morehead scholarship award, which provided funding to the genetics project she was working on. Dr. Mires had been in attendance and had talked Liz through all of the reporting jobs that Liz had applied for over break. They were both hopeful that offers would be coming in within the next couple weeks.
It was exciting and exhilarating being at the banquet, discussing the future, and finally realizing that this was the end. This was her last semester of college and then she would be out in the real world.
Hayden’s hands slid down the sides of her dress as soon as the door closed. One hand grabbed her ass and the other wound around her waist, drawing her into him. His breath was hot on her neck, and she squirmed against him.
“Bedroom,” he whispered huskily.
“Hayden . . .”
He released her waist and spun her around fast. She teetered in her heels, latching on to him for support just before his lips claimed her. That cut off all conversation. After he broke the kiss, Hayden took her hand and walked her back to her bedroom. She staggered forward after him.
They made it into the bedroom and Liz kicked off her heels. She wasn’t exactly drunk, but they were dangerous even when she was sober.
Hayden pulled her into him again and started walking them backward. His lips fell on top of hers once more. In between kisses, he murmured, “Bed.”
Liz swallowed hard. She wanted to get into this. She wanted this to happen. She wanted Hayden to remind her why she loved him. But as her knees hit the edge of the bed another pair of eyes flashed in her mind. Brown eyes. Big brooding brown eyes. Eyes that consumed her to her very core. The very same eyes of the person she had been kissing a few months ago.
She pulled back with a gasp. Holy shit! She couldn’t do this right now with such a heavy heart. They’d had an amazing time at the party. They had danced and drank and celebrated together. She had tried so hard to be what they had been. She had almost been able to forget what she had done. Almost.
“Hayden, stop,” she whispered, pushing lightly against his chest.
“I’ll close the door,” he said in response. He started walking across the room.
“No, that’s not what I meant.” She took a seat on the bed and her head swam. She wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol or the fear of what she was about to do.
Liz had never anticipated telling anyone about what had happened with Brady. She had sworn that she wouldn’t. She didn’t want to hurt Brady. But she had hurt him anyway and now he was gone from her life forever. She just knew that she couldn’t continue with this life she was leading. She couldn’t keep feeling the guilt and self-loathing about kissing the man that she had so desperately loved for so long. She just needed to be free.
“I want to talk to you,” she breathed.
Hayden shut the door and walked back over to her. His hands found her face, and he cupped her cheeks in his palms. “Let’s talk later.”
He had never been a sex-first-and-talk-later kind of guy. The alcohol must have been talking. Just as it was giving her the courage to speak up.
“No. Talk first,” she encouraged.
He breathed out heavily. “I think we should wait.” He eased her back on the bed and started trailing kisses down her neck.
“Hayden . . .”
“Shhh . . .” he whispered, running a hand up her bare thigh. “I just want to feel you next to me.”
On any other night, she would have preferred his forthrightness. He wasn’t normally this guy. He wasn’t normally demanding. And she liked this new Hayden. She found that she actually really, really wanted it. But she couldn’t.
“No, Hayden. No,” she said more forcefully. She pushed him off of her and rolled off of the bed. She flicked on the side table lamp so she could see his face. “We really need to talk.”
The alcohol was sending liquid courage through her veins, and still her stomach knotted with anxiety. How would he take what she was about to say? She had told Victoria that the worst thing that could happen would be for Hayden to leave her. The uncertainty ate away at her. Was he going to blow up on her? Was he going to just be shocked? She wouldn’t know until she told him, but as she stood there in front of him, her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.
“What do we need to talk about?” Hayden asked, clearly frustrated. He straightened himself, crossed one leg over the other at the ankle, and leaned forward.
She could tell that he had no idea what she was about to throw at him. There was no way she could approach this as she had with Victoria. At that time, she had just blurted out that she had kissed someone else, but with Hayden she couldn’t imagine what that would do to him. She couldn’t break him.
“Um . . . I’ve been meaning to tell you this for a long time,” she began carefully. “I just didn’t know how to say it.”
“Didn’t know how to say what?” Hayden asked. There wasn’t any caution in his voice at all. He had no clue. She hated herself for what she was about to do to him in that moment.
“I know you might be mad with me, but please just let me explain.”
That sure captured his attention. He sat up straighter and his hazel eyes narrowed. She could see that he was trying to figure out where this was going, and that he hadn’t expected that at all. There was no going back now.
“So . . . two summers ago, I was dating someone else,” Liz began.
“You were?” he asked clearly confused.
“Yeah. I met this guy, and we had this secret relationship the summer before my junior year. I was still seeing him when I visited you in D.C.”
Hayden’s eyebrows rose sharply at that comment. She hated telling him the whole story, but she knew that she needed to. He wouldn’t understand if she didn’t start from the beginning.
“It was a strange relationship. One that’s kind of hard to explain. One that up until last week, I’d never told anyone else about. We weren’t exactly exclusive, but . . .” Liz cringed. She wished there were an easier way to explain this. “Anyway, I was with you in D.C. and then sometime shortly after school started, he and I broke it off. Well, I left him.”
“Why are you telling me all of this?” Hayden asked, unable to keep the slight tone of anger out of his voice.
She didn’t blame him.
“Because I saw him again in October.”
Hayden stopped moving. He had only been slightly fidgeting with his suit coat and tapping his foot, but when she said that he stopped everything and just stared at her.
“When in October?”
She could tell that he already knew the answer. Her heart pounded away in her chest. This was going to be even more difficult than she thought.
“When we had our argument,” she whispered.
Hayden stood at the statement. He walked to the end of the bed and rested his hand on the footboard, facing away from her. His chest was rising and falling with barely concealed anger and pain . . . betrayal.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you this whole time, but I never found a way. There was always something else.”
“What happened?” he asked, his voice cold.
“He picked me up from the paper. We kissed. That’s it,” she said earnestly.
Hayden sagged against the footboard. He brought his hand to his head and she saw his shoulders shake. There. She had broken him. And it hurt so fucking bad. She couldn’t even see his face, but she knew, she just knew that she had hurt him beyond compare. She could imagine his face crumpled and the hollowness in his eyes at her words.
“I swear it will never happen again. We agreed to never see each other after that,” she told him. It hadn’t gone exactly that way, but it wasn’t as if it wasn’t the truth. “I felt so terrible, and I wanted to tell you, Hayden. I really did.”
“Then why didn’t you?�
� he asked, his voice the same cold calculation.
“I don’t know.”
He turned around sharply. “I was a total prick to you that day. I was completely a hundred percent in the wrong. And I owned up to that. I told you exactly everything that I did, and you let me sit there and grovel. I might have pushed you back to him that day, but you had your opportunity to tell me what happened and you chose not to.”
“I know,” Liz whispered, tears welling in her eyes. She could have told him what had happened. She could have been honest, but she hadn’t.
“I felt like absolute shit for months. I tried to do everything I could to be better. Calleigh has been breathing down my fucking throat since I started working there. Why don’t I just go back to Charlotte and kiss her?”
Liz gasped. Her hands flew to her face and tears fell from her eyes. “No.”
“It wouldn’t be any different, would it?”
“No,” she whispered, shaking her head. She didn’t know if she answered him or if she was just horrified at the thought.
“Did he try anything else?” Hayden demanded, the fire still in his eyes.
Liz shook her head.
“Don’t fucking lie to me!” he yelled.
Liz took a step back, startled by the outburst. It so wasn’t Hayden. “Yes! Okay! Does it make you feel better?” she cried. “He wanted to fuck me. But I didn’t let him. I made him take me back home. All right?”
“Jesus Christ, Liz,” Hayden spat. “You had another guy’s hands on you, another guy’s lips on you, another guy’s body against yours . . .”
“I didn’t say . . .”
“Who is it?” he demanded.
“Hayden, I can’t.”
He walked slowly toward her until he was standing directly in front of her. She cowered slightly at the feel of him hovering over her. “Liz, who is it?” he asked, his voice low and deliberate.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It fucking matters,” he growled.
Liz bit her lip and stared down. She couldn’t tell him. No fucking way.
“Is he at the paper?”
She glanced back up into his eyes and shook her head. “No.”
“It’s not Justin?”
Liz laughed and then quickly cleared her throat. So not appropriate.
Hayden glared at her. “Are you actually laughing? Do you find something about this funny?”
“No. No, it wasn’t Justin,” she squeaked.
“Do I know the guy?”
“Um . . .” she said, deciding on how to answer that. God, she didn’t want to be having this conversation. “You’ve, um . . . met.”
He reached out and grabbed both of her shoulders in his hands. She stared up into those eyes and saw a wildness she had never seen before. “Look, I’m not going to confront him. I just need to know. Don’t you understand? I’m going crazy here. I love you so fucking much. You’re my whole world, Lizzie. You’re everything to me. I was the idiot who pushed you away, and I swore I was never going to make you feel like that again. If I don’t know who the guy is, you’re going to make me feel like this forever.”
Liz cringed away from the accusation. She didn’t want to make him feel like this. It had been eating at her for long enough. She didn’t want to hurt him too, but she couldn’t tell him. She shook her head, breaking eye contact.
“Really? You won’t tell me?”
When she didn’t answer, he shook his head and then seemed to consider another option.
“You said I met the guy. Where?” he said, his tone going back to commanding.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Lizzie, where did I meet him?” he said, shaking her lightly until she looked up at him. “Where?”
“The colloquium last spring,” she finally whispered out of guilt. Hayden dropped his hands and just stared at her. Oh no. Please don’t figure it out. She could see that his brain was ticking away, putting the pieces together, fitting things into place. He was seeing the solution in front of him but not really believing it. He was a damn good reporter, and he hadn’t gotten that way without being able to see the big picture from a lot of smaller clues.
“But I was late,” he mused aloud. “I didn’t meet anyone at the colloquium.”
Liz swallowed and remained frozen. If he wasn’t seeing it, then she wasn’t going to help him out. She couldn’t tell him. God, she felt sick to her stomach. Whatever alcohol was inside of her was slowly churning away, eating away at her insides, pushing bile up her throat. She covered her mouth and tried to push down the acidic taste.
“Who did I meet there?” he asked, racking his brain.
Liz shook her head. She couldn’t tell him.
Hayden stopped and pointed at her, but he was looking off in the distance. She froze in place with his finger near her face.
“Brady Maxwell. I met Brady Maxwell. But he’s a congressman,” Hayden said softly. “He’s a sitting congressman.”
His eyes found hers and she stopped breathing. She was trapped in that look. He was commanding her attention, and all she wanted to do was run away and hide. She had brought this down on herself.
“Two summers ago, he would have just been running for Congress. He was your first reporting job. I was with you. He’s our politician,” he said, the hurt seeping deeper and deeper into every syllable. “Tell me it’s not him, Lizzie. Tell me it’s not him.”
Liz just stood there. What could she say? She couldn’t corroborate the story, and she couldn’t lie anymore.
“Brady Maxwell,” Hayden said as if he still couldn’t believe it. “You hated him. You disagreed with everything that he said. You wrote some brilliant articles practically calling for his job and still you fucked him?”
“Hayden . . .”
“Tell me how this happened,” Hayden said. “I just don’t see how you could go from interviewing him, writing those articles, to ending up in his bed.”
Liz bit her lip and glanced away. “I met him at the club we went to after his press conference.”
“You met him, fucked him, and then wrote those articles?” he asked in disbelief.
“No, no, no. I went back with you that night. But after that, I kept running into him while he was on campaign that summer. We just kind of tumbled into it.”
“You did this all summer and no one caught you?”
“His press secretary and attorney caught us, but otherwise no. I went by a fake name, Sandy Carmichael, so it wouldn’t be traced back to me,” she whispered. When she said it like that it sounded so much worse than what it had been in reality.
“A fake name? Do you realize how insane that sounds?” Hayden spat. “Christ, isn’t he like thirty? You weren’t even legal to drink when you were together.” He fisted his hand into his hair.
“Twenty-seven,” she whispered. “He was twenty-seven.”
“Don’t fucking defend him!” Hayden cried. “The guy manipulated a twenty-year-old college student who wrote a bad article about him to get her on his fucking side.”
“He didn’t manipulate me,” she said, unable to stop herself.
“You’re so deep in that you didn’t even see it. A dick with a little bit of power sees a young girl with a little bit of backbone and takes that away from her in a few easy fucks.” He shook his head. “He used you.”
Liz fisted her hands at her sides. She couldn’t even think that. No. That wasn’t what happened. Brady had loved her . . . at one point. He hadn’t used her. She had to remind herself of that. Things had been different. It was easy to see it from an outsider’s perspective, to break their relationship down into one line and show her as the victim. But she had never felt like a victim with Brady. Not once.
“No,” she breathed.
“Then explain to me what happened in October. He tried to fuck you, you said no, and then you agreed not to see each other again, which I assume means he told you to fuck off. Sounds like he came for what he wanted, but didn’t get it.”
“Hayden, stop.”
“I see it for what it is,” Hayden said, grasping her shoulders and forcing her to look at him again. His grip tightened and she winced.
“Hayden, let go,” she whimpered.
“Is that why we couldn’t be together before the election? Is that why you resisted me for so long? Fuck, is that why we didn’t even have sex for months?”
She tried to wiggle out of his grasp, but he held her tightly.
“Answer me. You owe me that. Is that the reason? Was it because of Brady?”
Liz cringed at the words. She’d hoped that he would never come to that conclusion. “Hayden, you’re hurting me!”
He pushed away from her and paced the room. He rested his hand on the nightstand and reached down. Liz swallowed hard. She wanted to say something, anything to make it better, but there was nothing to say.
“What is this?” Hayden asked. And then Liz saw what he was holding, the necklace she had left there when Victoria had called for her earlier this afternoon. “These aren’t my charms.”
“I know,” she managed to get out.
Hayden turned back to face her brandishing the necklace as an accusation. “Is this his too? Is this why you wore it up until the election and I never saw it again?”
Liz bit her lip and refused to answer, but her non-answer was enough. Hayden threw the necklace across the room where it hit the wall and fell to the carpet. Liz gasped and covered her mouth.
“All of this time I just thought you weren’t ready for a relationship and then you weren’t ready to be physical. But you were just holding on to him.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. There was nothing else for her to say. She had hurt him, crushed him. There was no coming back from that.
“What are you sorry for? Kissing him? Cheating with him? What about emotionally cheating on me for our entire relationship?”
“Yes. I don’t know,” she stammered. She wasn’t sorry for Brady and yet she hated hurting Hayden. “All of it.”
He turned back to her, grasped her chin firmly in his hand, and stared down into her glassy blue eyes. “You know what. I see it. I see what he did to you. And . . . I forgive you.”
