Not The One (London Lovers #4)

by Amy Daws

  “Because it’s none of your business.” I bite my lip nervously, trying to figure out why I’m getting so defensive over his questions about my involvement with Hayden. What am I to be ashamed of? Why can’t I tell Liam we’re friends? Because I know deep down, that’s not all we are…and I don’t want to lie to Liam.

  “So you can ask me if I’m seeing anyone, but I can’t ask you? That makes a lot of sense, Rey.”

  “You didn’t ask me if I was seeing anyone. You asked me about Hayden.” Specifically! I want to shout.

  My reply stifles his next response and his angry jaw muscle flares out. He nods, his eyes hard and closed off. “I think I’ve heard enough.”

  He turns to walk away and I feel a panicky desire to find a reason to make him stay. It’s confusing as hell. I’ve wanted to avoid this man for the better part of three years and now that he’s leaving, all I want to do is reach out and grab him.

  “Take care, Rey.” His face is stony serious.

  Unsure what else I can possibly say to save this exchange, I say the only thing I can say after all the pain I caused, “Take care, Liam.”

  Nothing like being sprawled out over the top of a man’s naked body and not totally remembering how you got there to make you feel like you’ve finally hit rock fucking bottom.

  Lying on my back, I feel the rapid rise and fall of Hayden’s chest beneath me. His quick breaths match my own. His sprinkling of spiky blond chest hair is scratchy on my sweat-slicked skin. Swallowing hard, I attempt to remember how we even ended up in this position? My body sprawled out perpendicularly over his on top of my mess of a bed. What kind of Cirque du Soleil shit did we attempt this time?

  Maybe if I focus on the ceiling fan blades spinning painfully slow above us, something will come to me. I blink one eye and then the other to see if that helps. Now the five blades look like twenty. That can’t be right.

  “That was a new one, even for you Rey-Rey,” Hayden says, his voice scratchy and hoarse from our exertions. He drops a kiss on my shoulder.

  Shit.

  I so can’t remember. That can only mean one thing:

  I’m drunk.

  Drunk.

  Drunk.

  Drunk.

  So very, very drunk.

  The air of my apartment feels balmy after the rapid cardio workout we just performed. All that panting and moaning and groaning and screaming. Fuck. We were loud. I was definitely loud. I can remember that much.

  “Shut up, Hayden,” I groan and attempt to peel my sticky body off of his. His hands band around my waist and pull me back against him. He finds my breasts and begins kneading them playfully, tweaking my nipples in the process.

  “Stop,” I groan.

  “I’m not complaining babe. That position was hot as hell.” His breath is warm on my ear and reeks of beer and cigarettes.

  When I continue to fight his embrace, he finally lets me get up. I stand, feeling stiff and sore in all the wrong—or right—depending how you look at it—places. I kneel over and pull the blanket up off the floor, searching for my clothes. A shirt, panties, anything. I’ll take anything at this point.

  “Is that one new? I don’t remember it,” Hayden drawls, rolling over on his side and eyeing my new marking along my ribs. “God your ink is sexy as fuck.” He reaches out and gently scrolls his fingertips over the newly healed ink.

  I defensively turn away from him to conceal the new quote I got from the song Love Life. It’s a gorgeous, script font across my left ribs that says, “Just remember it all, the beauty as well as the flaws.” I so don’t want to talk to Hayden about the meaning behind a quote from mine and Marisa’s favorite song. It’s too personal and it’s too deep and just…no.

  Feeling annoyed by his heated perusal, I snap, “Don’t look at me. You shouldn’t even be here.” I hate that he calls my ink sexy, too. It’s not sexy. It’s…it’s the opposite of sexy.

  “Why don’t you stop saying that and come back to bed.”

  I stand up and stare at him incredulously. God, this is a new low, even for me. Hayden and I swore we’d stop whatever it was we were doing. Why do we keep coming back to each other? The answer to that scares me.

  I frown at him and finally catch a glimpse of my shirt beneath his feet. I walk over and grab it, quickly yanking it down over my head. Fucking crop top. Real helpful. He grins dopily at me.

  “I want you to leave, Hayden.”

  His answer is a scowl, appearing momentarily wounded and then shrugs his shoulders, tossing me a flirtatious grin. God those fuck me eyes of his. If I wasn’t already half naked, I’d feel like it by the way he looks at me sometimes.

  Hayden is bad for me. I’m even worse for him. We’re both damaged and fucked and nearly unrecognizable to our families. I know this. Why do I keep coming back to it…to him?

  Here I am…continuing to fuck up our lives at any cost. Maybe if I wouldn’t have been drunk myself, I could have been stronger. I could have said NO when he showed up hammered on my doorstep.

  God, I’m weak.

  God, I’m pathetic.

  God, he needs to leave.

  “You have to leave, Hayden,” I say, tossing his pants at him. “Go to wherever you were on your way to and get out of my apartment.”

  Hayden throws his legs off the side of the bed and sighs heavily. “What’s the point?” he asks sadly. “We always end up right back here.” He pats the bed gently with both his hands and flops back onto his back, his softened erection showing renewed signs of life.

  “Go! I don’t want you here,” I shout again and toss his shirt at him to cover up his dick. I’m sick of looking at it. I’m sick of fucking it. Why do I keep doing this shit?

  “Rey,” he hiccups and sits up, blinking slowly. “Stop treating me like some dick you just fucked from the club. You’re…Fuck. Sometimes your honesty just bloody hurts.”

  I groan, dropping to my hands and knees, searching beneath the mounds of sheets and blankets for my shorts. “It’s the truth, alright? We are the worst best friends to each other ever. I mean, we aren’t even fucking for fun. We’re not fucking for love. We fuck for all the wrong reasons. Sick, dark reasons. We suck so much, Hayden.”

  He grabs me by my arms and hoists me up so I’m perched on my knees and eye level with him. “You don’t suck. I suck. I’m pathetic.”

  “We’re not playing the pathetic game again, because no one ever wins. We’re both shitty. Let’s just try to be a less grade of shitty for once in our lives.”

  “You don’t see it.” His eyes lazily look over my entire face before he sighs and mumbles, “I don’t want to be anything.”

  “What do you mean by that, Hayden?” I ask him seriously.

  “My family is throwing a fucking suicide benefit in a couple weeks. A benefit that they started because of the serious nothingness I have become. Do you know how sickening that is? Do you know how pathetic that makes me feel? Has your mother started a charity focusing on the lowly, degrading, nothingness of your transgressions?”

  I flinch at him mentioning my mother. “The list is much too long I’m afraid. There’s no clear category for ‘disappointing child turned tattooed, slutty back-stabbing rebel’ for her to start a benefit around. Though if I give her enough time, I’m sure she’ll find a way to make it into one so it looks good on stationary.”

  “Whatever fucked up shite we have going on here is the only time I feel anything. The rest of it…It’s all just too much, Rey.”

  “Hey!” I shout at him and his droopy head snaps to attention. “You’re not being an idiot are you?”

  He frowns at me. “No more than normal. You?”

  “No more than normal.”

  “Fair enough,” he nods solemnly steeling himself to look more alert. “I need to go anyway. No need to kick your best mate out.” We both stand and he clumsily dresses back into his clothes. His tall muscular frame looks hunched and run down. He needs to stop drinking and start exercising again. We both do.
<
br />   “You’re taking a cab right?” I ask seriously as I guide him to the door. “We don’t need another incident.”

  He flinches and snaps, “I’m not going to fucking kill myself, Rey. Leave it the fuck alone!”

  “Hey!” I shout at him. “Don’t talk to me like that!” I eye him seriously but try not to be too rough with him.

  “I’m sorry,” he grumbles. “I hate that shite though and you know it. I get it enough from my mum, I don’t need it from you. You’re supposed to be my escape.”

  I swallow the knot forming in my throat. “I know, Hayden. But we can’t escape everything forever. We’ve got to get back to our lives and stop doing this. We’re toxic. Our pathetic-ness knows no limits! We have to set them.”

  “Limit our pathetic-ness? Sounds impossible. There’s too many reminders of it everywhere.” He glances over to the picture I have on the entryway table. I flinch at the location of his gaze.

  “Please go, Hayden,” I quietly echo again.

  He nods sadly and turns, pulling me into a hug. My short frame barely reaches the bottom of his chest. He kisses me briefly on the forehead and then slumps off.

  Closing the door, I mindlessly walk over to the picture frame on my hall table. My heart aches before I even look at it. I pass it every day and every day it aches. I thought eventually it would ache less. It doesn’t. It continues to ache every day and I relish that ache. I hope it never stops. And anytime I feel the ache lessening, I get new ink to remind me why I crave that constant ache.

  That ache is my reminder of how I fucked everything up so monumentally.

  Explosions.

  That’s what it feels like my life has been full of. A series of monumental explosions that have shaped and shredded every single part of me. Up until today, the explosions weren’t entirely self-inflicted.

  Now, they are.

  After my horrid nightmare of Marisa on the hillside, I still can’t manage to get myself up and clean the wreckage all around me. I can’t even answer my phone that keeps ringing and ringing. All I keep doing is envisioning Marisa coming into our dorm room and having her whole life come crashing down around her.

  She’s going to lose her boyfriend.

  She’s going to lose her business partner.

  She’s going to lose her future.

  She very well may lose her best friend.

  I’ve fallen from grace, but I will devote my entire life to coming back if she’ll let me. I know loss and I know she’ll need me to get through all of this. As strange as that sounds—especially considering I’m the one who caused all of this—I’m the only one that can be there for her in the way that she’ll need.

  If she grants me the opportunity to atone, to make amends for what I did. Just two little words are all I’m asking her to hear from me.

  I’m sorry.

  I just need two teeny, tiny, simple words to make all of my guilt and anxiety and dread over what I did to be forgotten.

  And if I’m lucky…forgiven.

  Loud pounding echoes through my room. “Reyna. Rey! Open up,” Liam’s voice shouts from the other side of the door.

  What’s he doing here? We decided I would tell Marisa by myself once she returned from her parent’s place. If he’s having second thoughts, I don’t want to hear them.

  “Rey, it’s an emergency,” his voice cracks on a painful whimper.

  I jump up instantly and wrench open my door, my eyes wide and worried. On the other side is a disheveled mess of a man who resembles Liam. His face is white and coated with a sheen of sweat. His jaw is slack and his eyes look like they are about to roll into the back of his head as he blinks slowly, looking anywhere but into my eyes.

  “It’s Marisa,” he says, his voice rising in panic at the end.

  “What?” I ask, instantly on alert and somehow knowing at the same time what he’s about to tell me.

  “She…she…” his words cut off as he struggles to say them. “She’s gone, Rey. There was an accident and…” His face crumples, as he can’t bring himself to finish the sentence.

  Outside, my fearful expression morphs into a flat, emotionless statue. My eyes pull back into tight slits. My hunched posture stretches so I’m standing erect, my posture perfectly straight.

  Liam’s voice continues, “It was…there was a quad accident on the property. They said she was gone when the medics arrived.”

  Inside I’m crumbling.

  Imploding.

  Shredding.

  Disintegrating.

  I nod solemnly as if he’s just told me the day’s homework assignment. Finally, I hear my voice reply, “I’m so sorry for your loss, Liam.” I turn my lips down into that sad expression that I remembered seeing at my father’s funeral when I was only five-years-old. All these people kept patting me on the head and saying the same thing over and over. All their faces looked the same. Wrinkled and contorted in a way that was anything but sympathetic. It was disgusting. And here I was doing the same thing to Liam.

  I blink and two hot tears escape down my face. I wipe them, confused at how they formed and fell without my allowance. I didn’t permit them to fall. I didn’t permit them to exist! Damn these tears. Damn them to hell. My chin begins wobbling and more tears join the first betrayers. Feeling suddenly woozy, I reach out to grab the doorframe to steady myself.

  For the first time Liam looks straight into my eyes and that’s when he really loses it. He releases a strange guttural noise that doesn’t sound human. He reaches out to embrace me and I put my hand out to stop him. I shake my head no over and over and over. My vision blurs from how fast my head is shaking back and forth. Feeling a painful crescendo within my body has me retreating back into my room and away from him. I need space. What’s coming is scaring the daylights out of me.

  He follows me inside and reaches for me as I turn away and drop down hard on my knees. My mouth opens in a silent cry. Thick spit clings to the back of my throat as I ball my fists up to my chest and scream a loud, blood-curdling scream.

  This has to be a lie. This has to be a nightmare. One that I’ll wake up from any second now. Life was bad enough before this. I don’t need more added to it. I need to get to that point in the dream. That point in the dream when it becomes so intolerably scary you don’t think you can take another second of it. That point when you think if you don’t wake up soon, you’re truly going to die inside the dream and be gone forever.

  Two large arms clamp down around me and rock me back and forth, sobbing alongside me. All the noises seem like they are coming from someone else. They don’t sound anything like me. Who’s making all that noise? They must be going through something really tragic right now. How sad for them.

  “I’m so sorry, Rey. I’m so, so sorry.”

  Liam’s voice cuts into my internal warring and I glance over my shoulder to see him holding me in a weird, squatting stance as I sit in the middle of my room on my knees. This is real. Those sounds are coming from me. This isn’t a dream.

  This is yet another explosion.

  This one so much worse than the others…because of what I did. Because of what Liam and I did.

  “I need to be alone, Liam,” I grind out on a painful cry. I stand up, pulling out of his hold.

  He stands in front of me, reaching out cautiously like I might explode if he pushes the wrong button. Slowly he replies, “No, Rey. I don’t think you should be alone. I want to help.”

  “No Liam, I need you away from me.” I step back and duck over to the door, opening it for him to walk out.

  He scrubs his hands down his tear-stricken face and says, “Please, Rey, let me hold you. You’re not the only one hurting.”

  “I don’t give a shit!” I scream, “I need you out of my life. Don’t you get that? I’m a walking explosion, Liam! Get the fuck out of my wake…and get the fuck out of my life.”

  “Please, Rey,” he walks toward me.

  “Go!” I cry out and shove him out the door. “I want nothing to do w
ith you. Nothing.” And the last thing I see before I slam the door in his face, is that look.

  That haunted look of remorse.

  I never got to say those two little words. I never got to get them out. I completely and utterly betrayed my best friend and I was fully prepared to grovel and spend a lifetime trying to win back her trust.

  Because she was worth it.

  She was worth trying to win back. Her friendship was that special. And now she was dead.

  “Reyna, honey. Have you eaten?” my mother croons into my ear as we stand in the living room of the Clarke family residence in Essex. The same place that Marisa died. How utterly morbid to have the funeral here.

  I cringe away from her touch and shake my head in disgust. “I’m not hungry.”

  I glance over to her and she’s giving me one of those pinched, awful smiles that I despise. It’s the smile that she gives me when she wants me to do something but I refuse and she doesn’t want to look upset.

  My mother is dressed in a simple black, long-sleeve dress with black tennis shoes. I’m dressed in a pair of black leggings and a long black shirt that goes down to my thighs. I couldn’t bother doing anything special to my hair, so it’s pulled back into a messy ponytail. I don’t even remember the last time I truly brushed it.

  “I understand you not wanting to eat. You lost a very dear friend. Marisa was so special, but so are you. You need to remember what a true miracle your existence is my love—”

  “Mom! Stop!” I snap loudly and everybody’s eyes swerve over to me. Staring at me is a room full of idiots in black, all offering that same ridiculous pinched smile that’s shaped like a downward pointing crescent.

  One set of brown eyes stand out from all the others. Liam is standing out on the porch next to Marisa’s older brother, Theo. He eyes me through the open doorway and then looks away just as quickly.

  I blink and tears begin to fall down my face. I storm past my mom through the house and out the back door by the kitchen. I burst out into a gray and dreary day of drizzling rain.