Deciding Love (24 page)

“Mr. Briggs?”

We all stood at the same time. The doctor looked as tired as we did, which made me nervous. It hadn’t really sunk in that they could come back with bad news. How would I handle it?

“I-is she okay?” Dad asked.

“She’s recovering,” the doctor replied.

I let out a slow breath. Cat gripped my hand tightly.

“We’ll have to keep her here for a few days to monitor that the swelling goes down, but it looks like we’ve stopped the internal bleeding. I think she’ll be just fine,” he said to all of us.

“When can we see her?” Asked Cat.

“Not until tomorrow. Right now she needs to rest.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Dad said.

The man smiled and nodded before turning and disappearing through the doors again.

Dad turned and hugged both of us. I looked over his shoulder to see Chloe standing back, a genuine smile on her face, and possibly tears in her eyes. She had stuck by us and been upset over someone who wasn’t even related to her. And now she looked as relieved as we did. This girl was too nice. Too good.

I needed her away from me until I could make sense of all the thoughts rushing through my mind.

“Why don’t you take the girls home?” Dad said, stepping back.

“The doctor said she just needs to rest,” Cat said. “Why don’t you come home too? We all need some sleep.”

He shook his head just like I knew he would. “I want to stick around.”

“Cat, why don’t you take Dad’s car and go with Chloe. I’ll stay here with Dad,” I suggested.

She looked reluctant but nodded anyway. I chanced a glance at Chloe and saw her troubled gaze was already on me. I offered her a forced smile that I knew from her deepening frown she did not buy.

“I’ll give you a call later,” I said, not sure if I meant it or not. Fuck, I was so confused.

Seeing this made me realize just how much it was going to hurt when Chloe and I eventually broke up, because I knew we would, it was inevitable. If I kept going the way we were, there was no doubt in my mind that I’d fall in love with her. If I hadn’t already.

I didn’t want to end up like my dad. I didn’t want to find myself destroyed and crying over a woman I’d lost.

It just wasn’t worth it.

I’d known this from the beginning. I should have kept reminding myself. Because now I was going to end up hurting her, just as I knew I would.

From the way her eyes moved away from mine, I could almost guarantee I already had.

27

Chloe

Don’t panic.

Cat was still asleep when I woke up, so I headed down to the kitchen to brew coffee before taking it outside. Each sip should have energized me as it always did in the morning. But not today.

Kyle never came home last night.

I didn’t know what to think. He’d been acting strange at the hospital, his eyes distant and colder than I was used to. Everything between us had been perfect at my house before that phone call, so I had to believe the change in him after was just from his concern for his mother.

Then why did I have an ugly feeling in the pit of my stomach? My sixth sense was screaming at me that something was wrong. It had been doing that since the moment Cat and I had gotten into the elevator at the hospital.

Thankfully she had needed me, so that had helped to distract my mind for most of the evening. But once she’d finally fallen asleep, I’d lain in a sleeping bag on the floor beside her bed, listening. Waiting. I don’t know how long I had lain there, hoping to hear Kyle’s return, but it never came. Exhaustion finally won out and I’d fallen into a fitful sleep.

When I woke up this morning, I’d tiptoed out of Cat’s bedroom and headed to Kyle’s room. It was obvious he hadn’t been back, his bed still made from the day before.

He could have just stayed at the hospital with his dad, I reasoned.

The sickening dread in the pit of my stomach though didn’t think so. I couldn’t see their dad letting him stay, knowing how tired he’d be. Then again, I didn’t really know their parents well enough to make that assumption.

Taking a sip of my coffee, I burrowed into Kyle’s sweater that I’d borrowed against the cool breeze this morning. The sun was shining, and sky cloudless, and yet it couldn’t have felt drearier if it were storming. I pulled my knees up to my chest and stared off into space, my mind strangely blank.

When the back gate opened, my stomach dropped as though I’d just fallen off the side of a cliff. One look at Kyle and I knew. I knew something horrible was about to happen and there was nothing I could do or say to stop it.

It was in the way he looked at me as our eyes met. This was even worse than when he’d been trying to ignore his attraction to me before we’d started dating. He’d admitted that he had to feign indifference so I wouldn’t know how he had really felt.

There was no pretend coldness now, just the real thing. Whatever warmth had been there before was completely gone, replaced by something that left me feeling chilled to the bone.

“Hey,” he said hesitantly, stopping on the other side of the table.

“Hey,” I replied, my voice soft yet hoarse. I didn’t want to say the next words, but I knew I had to. “Where were you all night?”

He looked away from me, and again I knew. Tears sprung in my eyes just as an ache bloomed in the back of my throat. I tried to swallow it down, but that only managed to make it worse.

“Kyle?”

Was that pitiful voice mine? He turned back to me, and instantly I recognized regret flash across his face before he hardened it again.

“I just needed to be out,” he said. “Let loose a bit.”

“Let loose,” I repeated, rolling the words around my mouth. What did that mean exactly? Before I could ask him to explain, the gate opened again, and this time I didn’t just fall over the cliff, I crashed into the earth with jarring speed. My heart was instantly crushed before anyone could say anything.

“Kyle, you left your phone...” The girl trailed off as she looked at me and then him. “In my car,” she finished slowly.

“Thanks, Perrie,” he said.

And to obliterate whatever shards might have been left of my heart, he added, “I’ll give you a call later. Unless you want to come in for another round?” He said with that sexy smirk that used to set fire to my body. Now it just shot a hole through my chest.

Betrayal. Was there anything worse? This feeling of being unable to take a deep breath, of being unable to move because your body felt as though it had been hit by a truck. The feeling that everything you thought you knew about someone had been so completely wrong that you wonder if you even knew them at all. This feeling of utter, complete betrayal. There was just nothing like it. Nothing as painful.

The girl, Perrie, looked surprised at his offer, her eyes instantly going to my stricken face. And to give her credit, she looked as horrified as I felt when she recognized my hurt.

I stood, surprisingly steady considering how badly my hands and body shook. My eyes didn’t leave his as he looked at me, nothing written in those black depths.

“Why?” I asked, wanting, no,
needing
to know.

“Why what?”

I splayed my hand in front of me. “Why this? Why destroy what was between us?”

“And what was that?”

I staggered back as though he’d struck me. Slowly my head began to shake back and forth as I covered my mouth to stop the sobs clawing up my throat from escaping. “You,” my voice cracked. “You don’t mean that. You don’t mean any of this. Why are you doing it? Why?” I asked, firmer.

“Look, I don’t know what you expected, but everyone knows the deal. I don’t do relationships.” His voice was so flat and lifeless, I almost wanted to believe this wasn’t really Kyle in front of me, but a robot version of him instead.

We stared at each other as I tried to process this. What was I missing? How could we have gone from the way we’d been just yesterday, to this?

A sound behind me made me turn to see Cat standing there, her face just as stricken. It only made my eyes burn more, a tear slipping out from the side, burning a path down my cheek. I didn’t bother to wipe it away as I turned back to Kyle.

“I hope you’re happy,” I said, glancing at Perrie. “I hope this is what you need.” Taking a deep breath, I raised my chin, praying he couldn’t see my bottom lip quiver. “Please don’t ever speak to me again. Ever.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but I never heard what it was he intended to say. I’d turned and headed inside to grab my things and call my dad to come get me. Cat was right behind me and offered to drive me herself in her dad’s car. She seemed as eager to get away as I was.

Neither of us spoke on the way to my house. The silence was suffocating, and yet I couldn’t manage to speak. I felt broken. Tears just kept coming no matter how hard I fought them. The only communication we had between us during that drive was when Cat had reached over and gripped my hand tightly. I gave hers a squeeze back, letting her know I appreciated the gesture, but we didn’t speak. Because what was there to say when your best friend just watched you get your heart broken by her own brother?

Mom called out to me as soon as I stepped through the door. There was no way I could let her see me. I knew I was a mess, and both my parents would freak out. Yelling that I had to go to the washroom badly, I raced up the stairs before either could get a good look at my puffy, red eyes.

Slamming the bathroom door, I braced myself against the counter and faced the stranger awaiting me in the mirror. I was more than a mess, I was a complete disaster.

You would have to be blind not to see the heartbreak in the lifeless eyes staring back at you. My skin was pale and splotchy, my mouth tight. Oh God, it was as if Kyle had literally destroyed a part of me. Maybe he did. Maybe now I’d forever be jaded and not want to love again.

Because that was how I’d felt about Kyle. I had loved him. Or, at least, I had started to. If things had continued the way they’d been going, there was no doubt I would have fallen madly in love with Kyle Briggs.

Now?

Now I hated him. I hated Kyle Briggs with every fibre of my being. He had no idea what he was doing in life, wasting it away by closing himself off to anything good. And he’d pulled me into that abyss like the sucker that I am. Tricked me into thinking that we had something real together.

All those things he’d said when we’d be together, all the times he’d told me how different I was - lies. All of it.

Oh my god.

My breath turned into short wheezes as I stumbled to the toilet and sat down before I fell.

Had he said all those things just to get me to sleep with him? And now that I had...

Was that what it was all about for him? Tears burned my eyes again. I didn’t want to believe it, but how could I ignore the obvious facts? I slept with him for the first time, and the very next day he broke it off?

I really had no idea who Kyle was. I never did. I was stupid and naive, seeing things in him that were obviously not real.

Shit. What was I going to do come Monday? How was I ever going to face him again? There’s was no way I could ever get back in his car, or be around him at all. And I couldn’t get rides from Jax either. It looked like I was going to be walking for the rest of the year.

But I’d still see him. My eyes would go to his car no matter how hard I tried to stop them, and that ache would forever be there. I would never be able to heal.

And what if I saw him with another girl? Someone at my school? I couldn’t do it. I also could never go over to Cat’s again. There was no way I was going to stop being her friend, but I definitely couldn’t handle going to her place. Not with him there.

How was I going to survive the rest of this year? He’d always be around. Even if Colt had gatherings and invited me, he’d be there too. It’s not as if I would expect Colt to stop being friends with Kyle for my sake. But I also couldn’t go and hang around at a party where he would be.

This was such a mess. If only I had never called him that night. If only I had been smart enough to stay away.

An image of him looking at me with that look full of desire flashed in my mind, and I thought perhaps I didn’t regret it all.

Desire is all it was
, a voice pointed out. He probably looked at every girl like that. It was true. I was still doing it, making things seem more real than they had been.

I couldn’t see those dark eyes ever again. I just couldn’t. My heart couldn’t handle it. I needed to find a way to avoid him for good.

“Chloe, you okay?” Dad yelled up the stairs.

I wiped at my cheeks and called back, “yup! Just an upset stomach. Be down in a minute.”

That was when it hit me. The solution to all my problems. It wasn’t an easy solution, but it would get easier. Especially the longer it went. At least my heart could heal, and I wouldn’t have to see him anymore.

Standing, I flushed the toilet just for the ruse, then splashed some cold water on my face to hopefully hide how much I’d been crying. Taking a deep breath, I walked out and went to my bedroom first to change clothes. I’d have to give Cat Kyle’s clothes back the next time I saw her. Or burn them. Depending on how crazy I was feeling later. Either way, I needed them off me.