Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 90564 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 453(@200wpm)___ 362(@250wpm)___ 302(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90564 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 453(@200wpm)___ 362(@250wpm)___ 302(@300wpm)
Nerves fluttered in my stomach as I unlocked the front door. The electronic noise of a war game drifted into the entranceway, and I froze. I hadn’t expected him to be up, and the prospect of leaving this with a note was so much more appealing than seeing him in person.
I walked into the living room and wordlessly placed the guitar against the edge of the worn couch.
Hendrix’s gaze drifted away from the screen, landing first on the guitar, then on me. Holding my gaze, he paused the game, plunging the room into tense silence. “Where did you find that?”
“The pawn shop over by the liquor store.”
He picked it up, lovingly cradling it under his arm as he plucked out the tune of “Glycerine.”
My heart stumbled at the sound of the familiar chords. He used to play that song for me all the time, saying the lyrics were how he felt about me.
Notes filled the room, reminding me of all those sweet times between us. All the “I love you’s” and promises of forever.
As if catching himself, he suddenly stopped, slamming his palm over the stings to cut off the sound. “I’m having a party tonight.”
“Okay…”
Blue eyes met mine, the softness of moments ago now gone. “You probably don’t want to be here.”
It was a punch in the gut. There was only one reason I “wouldn’t want to be here.”
“I’m not here tonight, anyway.” I took a few steps back, but it might as well have been a hundred for the distance that lingered between us like a gaping chasm.
He’d confronted me about the past. I hadn’t been able to give him the answers he wanted, and now he hated me even more than before.
Two years of resentment had built and built, and this was the climax.
The nail in our coffin.
I was just his “whore” ex-girlfriend now. “You know I can move back in with Kyle...”
“All I said was, you probably wouldn’t want to be here. I’m trying to be nice.”
No, he wasn’t. He was letting me know that he was going to fuck girls until I was as inconsequential as every other whore. “Is that what we are now? Courteous roomies?”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
No, but what I wanted was the impossible. I couldn’t screw him without loving him, so I wouldn’t. But I didn’t want anyone else to, either. It was irrational, but more than anything, it was unfair. On him and me. “I wanted us to be friends.”
“You want to listen to my headboard bang the wall? Whatever.” He set the guitar to the side, swiping his finger over my name carved by the neck. “But we aren’t friends.”
His words were a knife to my heart, but still, a flicker of possessive rage rose. As hard as I tried to wrestle it down, I just couldn’t quite quell it. “Remember, Hendrix, what’s good for you is good for me.”
“And I expect the same opportunity not to be here to hear it,” he said, looking straight at me.
He was really doing this. He was prepared to let me be with a random guy. And that hurt far more than anything he might do with anyone else. Whatever Hendrix and I had been to each other, whatever I had done, he’d always seen me as his. I felt like a beloved pet dog whose owner had just driven it onto some back road, kicked it out, and driven off.
“Okay.” I nodded and tried to breathe through my tightening chest. “We’re not friends, Hendrix. We’re nothing.”
“Just like we’ve been for the past two years…”
“Yeah.” I turned and walked out of the room, not giving him a chance to see my tears fall.
* * *
Kyle only asked me what was wrong once during the hour drive to the Lancaster’s’ lake house. He knew when I said, “Nothing,” he should let it go.
Everything was wrong. The same way it always felt whenever Hendrix and I weren’t together. As though he were the center of my world, and the second he was gone, I just fell into chaos.
My mood remained bleak, even when we stepped onto the huge porch of the cabin-style house and Chad answered the door, an easy smile on his face.
I’d just introduced Kyle before a blur of pink barreled between Chad’s legs and Gracie collided with my thighs. “Lola! Lola!”
My little sister was the only thing that could make me forget about Hendrix Hunt. I scooped her into my arms with a dramatic huff. The glitter on her pink dress sparkled in the sunshine, her pigtails framing her cute little face.
“You’re so heavy now. Who let you get so big?” I teased.
She wrapped her arms around my neck, and her soft giggles rustled past my ear. “I eat all my vegetables.”
“Well, that must be it.”
She glanced over my shoulder. “Kyle came to visit me, too?” She looked past the both of us, searching. “Where’s Hendrix?”