You Don't Know Me: A Stand-Alone New Adult Romance Page 15

  If I had been by that pool, this never would have happened.

  As we turn the sharp corner to enter her room, Rue looks away from the T.V. screen and sits up straighter, greeting us all with a sheepish smile. The ache in my chest happens again. The best way I can describe it is it’s like my heart wants to tear out of my chest so it can touch her. Her eyes land on me, but Jenna climbs on the bed and rips her attention away from me. She smiles at her best friend and receives a bear hug, laughing hoarsely.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jack steps to the end and Sean goes around to the other side. I hang back a couple steps, in between Jenna and Jack. This isn’t my place in the hierarchy of this moment. Not as far as my two best friends are concerned, a fact I’m all too aware of. Fuck, I hate this.

  Jenna places her hand lovingly on Rue’s pale cheek. “You lost your tan. Dumb move.”

  Rue smiles. “I’m sorry.”

  Jenna shakes her head, her voice stolen by emotion as she takes Rue into her arms for a heartfelt embrace. Rue hugs her back, looking at me over her friend’s shoulder. Her eyes close and she buries her face in the long dark hair. “Don’t ever do that again,” Jenna chokes.

  “I won’t,” Rue whispers quietly.

  The three of us guys search out objects to focus on, swallowing the lumps that are growing like wet sponges in our throats.

  I inhale to shake it off to ask, “So, you’re okay?” shoving my hands in the pockets of my long swim trunks, the hem bowing to touch above my knee. Rue nods and glances to Jack. They stare at each other for a second, an understanding passing between them that doesn’t escape my or Sean’s notice. Remembering what the doctor said about us getting thrown out, I attempt to keep my mouth shut, and succeed for all of two seconds. “So, what happened?”

  Jenna scoots to sit next to Rue. “Rue, you should know they just…”

  “No, Jenna, it’s okay. I’ve got it,” she assures Jenna as she intertwines their fingers together.

  But Jack cuts her off. “She dove into the bottom and…”

  Rue finishes for him what she thought he was going to say, “And I didn’t want to come back up. I wanted stay there. It was stupid.”

  Stunned, my hands rip out of my pockets and I take a step forward. “What?”

  “What?!” Sean parrots me in shocked confusion.

  Jenna stares at her best friend and I can see from her expression that she suspected this. I can’t fucking believe it. Why would Rue want to kill herself? The idea is absurd and disturbing on so many levels that I can’t think straight. “Why, Rue?” she asks softly.

  Rue shrugs a little. “I don’t know. It’s not like I planned it. I didn’t. It’s just… the water felt so safe–so removed from everything that’s been going on. It’s been so much to take and I thought I was handling it. But I guess I wasn’t.” She gets quiet and we all wait. She touches the thin blanket lying over her legs and shakes her head. “When I saw those magazines and those awful things they were saying about me, it tipped me over I guess. I just wanted to make it all go away. When I was down there… I tried to swim up when I realized what was happening but it was too late… and I couldn’t.” Fresh tears fall down her cheeks. Jenna’s, too.

  But there are no tears for me. A building anger grows as the pieces fall into place. Slowly I focus on Jack, remembering the magazines we spotted on the way to lunch. We’d stopped and taken a look, the three of us. I’d known he was angry. We all were. But it never occurred to me that he would go, buy them all and bring them to shove in her face. “You didn’t,” I growl at him.

  Jack’s guilt has him quiet. “Look, Alec…”

  “You fucking asshole!” I step over and, unencumbered by Sean this time, I punch Jack hard in the face, breaking his nose.

  I swore I would protect her. I promised I wouldn’t let him hurt her. That she wasn’t alone. That I would be there for her. And I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there at the time she needed me most. I would never have let Jack show her that shit. And if he had showed her before I could stop him, I would have carried her away as soon as I saw what he’d done, if only I’d been there.

  He yells out at the pain, blood squirting from the split in his nose. I punch him again. Rue yells at me to stop, but I can’t. In a rage, he wrestles me to the ground and hits me twice, but I easily turn him over and take control of the fight, white-hot fury blurring my sanity into oblivion. As I reach back to throw another, Sean grabs both my arms and pulls me backward. I’m twisting, my legs trying to gain purchase as I shout, “Let me go! Let me go, Sean!”

  Jack scrambles up, his hand on his nose, blood dripping down both. “What the fuck is wrong with you?! You can drop the act.”

  “Let me go, Sean!” I yank my arms hard and Sean loses his grip. Pulling myself up to stand, I don’t know what he’s talking about.

  “You don’t have to act like you like her anymore, Alec. What I asked you to do…act like you were into her… you can knock it off now,” he growls, green eyes flashing.

  I gulp, stunned that he would stoop this low. My pause is just enough time to let Rue cry out. “What?” Her voice sounds so raw, I’m dying as I turn around with my hands reaching out.

  “No, Rue…”

  “Oh my God,” she whispers, her horrified face trained on me.

  “No, Rue. He asked me to do that. But I didn’t do those things with you because of that.”

  Her hand goes up to her throat and she lets out a strangled sound that brings Jenna to attention immediately. “You guys are not helping! Can’t you just be good people for once?”

  The room goes silent.

  My whole body aches from what she’s thinking. I have to make it right. “Rue, no. I wasn’t doing what he said. Last night, you know it wasn’t an act. I didn’t do those things with you because of what Jack asked me to do. You were in my room because I wanted you to be there. Come on! Think of how I looked at you this morning? Do you think I could have faked that?” I stop and look at Sean, realizing at the exact second he figures it out, too, that I lied to him about Maya being the one I spent the night with. I groan, “Fuck. Sean…”

  His lips curl, and he looks from me to Jack, and back to me again. Disgust doesn’t begin to cover how to describe his expression.

  “Leave,” Rue whispers, not believing me. Insecurity and exhaustion has twisted her and all I want to do is make her feel better, help her heal, but convince her, too. These desires are at war in me and I glare around the room, feeling very much ganged up on.

  “I’m leaving. But not because this is the truth and I’m guilty. I’m leaving because I care about you, and I want you to get better.” Turning on my heel, I walk out, just as our confused doctor approaches me, looking at my bloodied fist. “You’ve got a new patient,” I mumble and walk past him without another word.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Rue

  The doctor inspects Jack’s nose and declares it as broken, which is an eye-roller all around. Grim and drained, Jack lets him sew up the cut across the bridge. There are five stitches and the doctor assures him it won’t scar, but Jack doesn’t seem to care about that. I think he’s angrier at the scar potential on his friendship.

  Jenna’s sitting on the end of the bed, watching with a pained, empathetic wince every time the needle slides into Jack’s flesh. Sean’s got his arms crossed against his chest, and every now and again he huffs a sigh through his nostrils. When the doctor leaves and tells me I’m free to go home, too, the only word I can hear is home.

  I don’t know what to make of what happened with Alec. Dignity and pride are keeping my tear ducts at bay. I keep hearing I’m leaving because I care about you over and over, wishing I believed him and not knowing what to think. There was a moment by the pool when Jack apologized to me, I was so bleary-minded, but it felt like we’d tore down the wall so painstakingly built between us. But that Jack would set Alec on me like some beast he could rule, with the express intent to caus
e me pain, it’s brought that wall back up and added a few more thousand bricks.

  I just want to go back to the way things were. I want to go home. I want to put my dreams of a family behind me. Most of all, I want my heart to stop bleeding.

  The doctor leaves the room and Jack stands up from the chair, exasperated. I watch him without expression, blankly wondering why he saved my life if he wants to mangle me at every turn.

  Before they have a chance to speak, I push the blankets off and say, “I’m going to take a plane home with Jenna as soon as we get to the hotel.”

  Jack blinks, his existing frown digging deeper in above the purple bruising. “You mean a commercial jet?”

  “Perceptive,” I mutter sardonically. “Yes. I want to fly home on my own. With Jenna, I mean. Is that okay, Jenna?”

  “Of course!” She warily looks at the brothers, awaiting their reaction.

  Sean’s solemn gaze falls to the floor, and he shakes his head, mumbling, “I wish I knew how to make this all go away.”

  “Yeah. That’s pretty clear. So let me help you.” I throw my feet over the side and rise up, my body very tired and weak.

  “That’s not what I meant, Rue…”

  My hand flies up to the stop position. “Look. This whole thing–us pretending like we’re a family or that we have to try to be one? It was dynamite begging for a match.” I glance to Jack, expecting to see relief, agreement, or his usual disgust. But he’s watching me without any of those and it’s very disarming. I have to tear my eyes away to keep my mind clear. “It’s not working out. It’s not meant to be, I guess. We were pushing…”

  Jenna who is often able to finish my sentences, says, “A square peg into a round hole.”

  “Exactly.” She walks with me to the door. I turn and shrug, meeting the eyes of both of my half-brothers one after the other. “I’m sorry, but that’s what we’ve been doing. So let’s just go about our lives and forget we ever knew each other.”

  Jack and Sean are silent. I think before my little pool incident, Sean might have argued with me, tried to get me to give it one last try. I could be wrong; maybe he wouldn’t have. But when we were dancing at Space Ibiza, we had a really good time and it seemed we’d pushed away the discomfort of New York. But now, what’s he going to say? That this is a match made in heaven? No sane person would ever argue that in a million years.

  Meeting the eyes of my nemesis, I say, with more humor than I’m really feeling, “You won, Jack, just like you wanted. I surrender.” Giving them one last sad smile, I turn and leave with Jenna.

  “Cab back to the hotel?” she asks, padding next to me.

  “Yeah. No more limos for me.” Whispering softly, I ask, “Are they behind us?”

  She waits a second to glance back. “Nope. I guess they’re giving you the space you want.” She weaves her arm through mine. “Do you really want that space, Ruefus?”

  If she’d asked me that yesterday, I would have said no. Or even earlier this morning when she laid it out there for me that I don’t have a family; I would have said no then, too. But now? I want space very, very badly.

  Floating on the bottom of that pool… letting my life slip away from me… was something I never thought I’d do. It was a wake up call that I’d bit off more than I could chew. I’d been trying to be strong, fooling myself that I was able to go toe-to-toe with Jack Stone, but I’m just not that hard a person. I’m soft on the inside, a fact I don’t like to have pointed out to me. But pointed out, it is.

  “I need the space, Jenna. I don’t have a choice.”

  Chapter Forty

  Rue

  “I’d like to check out, please.” I hand the front desk clerk my key.

  Jenna and I had some food brought up to our room so I could get my strength back. My throat is still ragged, but I gargled salt water to help it heal. While we ate, we didn’t talk about what’s been happening and since that’s the only thing on our minds, it was the quietest meal we’ve ever had. A couple of times we heard people walking in the hall and we both stopped with our forks in the air, expecting a knock. But none came.

  It helped to have something to plan to keep my mind off the sadness I can’t help but feel. A helicopter will bring us over to Madrid where we’ll catch the flight home by way of Miami, just after eleven o’clock tonight. And now our luggage is on the far side of the lobby waiting for us on a bellboy’s cart, the teenage bellboy resting his weight on it. Jenna’s pink leopard-print suitcase and my purple one have new friends in the shape of two nondescript humungous black rolling cases, and I don’t like them at all. “You see those big honkin’ cases?”

  She glances over. “Yeah?”

  “Those aren’t nearly as much fun as ours are. That was me trying to be something I’m not.”

  She smiles and touches the Prada shades balanced on her head. “What about these?”

  I pull mine down to cover my eyes, striking a pose, the black slacks I bought in New York hanging beautifully off my curves. “Oh, these are very me.”

  She laughs, happy for the lighter mood, and puts hers down, cocking her hip out in a funny pose, the sundress she bought this morning after breakfast, fanning out prettily. We’d done a run of the hotel stores before hitting the pool, and it feels like weeks ago rather than hours.

  “Jenna, you know how you said you needed to buy that with your own money?”

  “To have something of my own, yeah,” she smiles, putting the shades up again so I can see her eyes.

  I follow suit and move my hair off of my shoulder. “I need that, too. When we get back, I’m going to go in and quit Ralphs, even though I’m sure I’m already fired.” I roll my eyes. “But I’m going to go handle my business and then you know what I’m going to do? All of my focus is going to dancing. I’m going to train harder than I ever have. I’m not going to just sit around on this pot of gold and get lazy. I want to follow my dream still. And I want to do something with the money, too. To help people. I’m not sure what yet, but I’m going to put some serious thought into it.”

  My friend lets out a big sigh that bends her whole body. “I was hoping you would say that! This is fun… but at the end of the day, what do you want to do?”

  “Right,” I smile, turning to face the clerk, embarrassed to catch him waiting for us behind his iPad. “Oh, sorry!” Pulling out my debit card, I slap it on the counter. “How much do I owe?”

  His tanned skin shifts into a professional smile, but I can see by the glint in his eyes that he liked what he just overheard. “Your room has been paid for, Ms. Calliwell. Mr. Gabriel took care of it.”

  Surprised, I glance to Jenna. “Oh! Well, that’s unexpected.”

  “He left this.” A gold wedding band glints in the light as he hands me an envelope that, while not aged, has a yellow tint to it. My blood freezes at the sight. One more affair that ripped the Stone family apart. I slip it into my purse. “Thank you. Cabs this way?” He nods and goes back to his work.

  We walk to the luggage and Jenna’s watching me stare at the shiny tile beneath our feet. Alec paid for my room. I know that’s a drop in the bucket of what he has financially, but did he do that to clear his conscious? I can and do believe Jack asked him to break my heart and that he agreed, but what if that was before he met me? What if he couldn’t do it in the end, because he ended up really caring? When he said he did care, a teeny tiny part of me believed him, but the larger realistic part just thought he was fighting for his reputation or his self-respect or… something? What if two people can really fall in love, almost at first sight? There’s enough evidence in the world supporting that, so why won’t my head give it a chance?

  As Jenna and the bellman head for the door, I mumble my next thought aloud, “Would he have punched his best friend just to keep up an act?”

  Jenna stops walking and asks the bellman to wait a minute. “I don’t think he would, do you? I mean, that’s jeopardizing a lot, don’t you think?”

  I nod, hope furiously
taking hold. “Do you think he’s still here? That was hours ago he paid for the room. Did he leave, do you think?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  Spinning around, I dash through the enormous lobby and skid in front of the reception desk. “Is Mr. Gabriel still here?” I croak, my voice still not a hundred percent. “Can you please call his room?”

  The clerk’s eyes darken, knowing he’s about to disappoint me. “I’m sorry. Mr. Gabriel checked out.”

  “Oh.” I bite my lips as my hands slowly slip off the counter. “Thank you.” He smiles the smile of one who likes to help people and hates it when he can’t.

  Walking back to Jenna, my hand digs for the envelope. She and I exchange a look as I open the letter.

  Rue, I’m sorry. Alec.

  My eyes flick left to right again and again, soaking it in and wishing there was more. With an ache in my chest, I show it to Jenna. “Well, he’s not as verbose as my father was, I can give him that.” Crumbling it up in one hand, I walk toward the exit, telling the bellman, “We can go now. Thank you for waiting.”

  “It’s no problem, Ms. Stone.”

  “My name’s not… never mind.” I follow him out, with Jenna at my side as she always is. “It hurts.”

  “Yeah,” she says softly, looping her arm through mine, her inner strength holding me up. “Let’s go home.” God bless best friends for carrying us when we’ve fallen, and for sparking the hope that keeps us up. “You can see him when you get home. I have a feeling he’ll be waiting to hear from you.”

  I rest my head on her shoulder as the sliding doors whoosh open.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Sean