Chapter Thirteen – Wren #2
The world stops, just for a second. All of the good times, all of the good memories, none of it matters anymore.
No, the only thing that rises inside me is the pain, the hurt, the betrayal.
Everything good we may have had is soured, and now I can’t look back at any of it in a good light.
For all I know, he lied to me our whole relationship.
Maybe Meghan wasn’t the only girl he cheated on me with.
But just as quickly as the world stopped, it starts back up again—only it moves faster, so fast the room around me spins, and I feel like throwing up.
I stand, mumble something incoherent to the guy who was trying to talk to me, and stumble out of the room, wanting only to get away from Mike.
I don’t want him to see me. I don’t want to talk to him.
I unfriended him, blocked him and his number.
Sloane sees me retreat into the hall, crawling off Elias’s lap to come with me. She grabs my arm and stops me, and thankfully we’re far enough out of the room that Mike is no longer in view. “What’s wrong?” she asks.
I don’t want to talk about my ex, plus I kind of worry that she or Elias would say or do something if I mention my ex is here.
Neither of them strike me as the kind of people who sit back and let jerks be.
Elias definitely is the type who’d get into a fight—and probably be happy about it—and Sloane would be cheering him on while standing in the sidelines, thinking it’s sexy or something.
So, another white lie comes from me: “It’s loud in there. I need some air. I’m going to go outside for a bit.”
Her blond brows furrow in concern. “You want to go home?”
With a shake of my head, I say, “No. I just need a moment. Go back to Elias.”
I can tell she doesn’t believe me, but after a moment, she relents: “All right, but if you change your mind, we can go.” She pulls away from me, returning to the living room, to the lap of her handsy boyfriend, and I watch her go before I zigzag through the people in the hallway to get outside. I go out back.
The house has a small paved patio in its backyard. The air is cool, but it’s anything but fresh thanks to the skunk-like stench that permeates through it.
I take a single step outside and groan, wrinkling my nose as the disgust hits me and I look at the person smoking a few feet away. A tall guy, his back to me, but with the light coming from the house’s windows, I can see the squareness of his shoulders, the blackness of his hair.
No way. No freaking way. I head outside with the intent of clearing my head and avoiding my ex, only to run into this guy? My luck must be terrible.
It’s like he senses me, because he tosses a glance over his shoulder and spots me a few feet away. If he’s surprised to see me, his face doesn’t show it, but he does take a long puff from his homemade cigarette that, based on the smell, isn’t tobacco. “Of fucking course,” he grumbles.
I debate on retreating, but all things considered I’m not ready to go back inside just yet, so I fold my arms over my chest and say, “I didn’t know you were here.”
Logan is slow in turning to face me, and his eyes drop to my feet.
That gaze of his examines me, his green eyes checking me out much like he did in the club last week, like he wants to take his time in memorizing everything about me, like he has nowhere else to be.
“Here I thought a frat party would be the one place you’d never be caught dead,” he mutters.
All I do is sigh and go toward one of the metal chairs arranged around a rectangular glass table. I make it a point not to say anything else to him, hoping he’ll get the hint to leave me alone, but to my dismay, he comes to sit in the chair beside mine. Lucky me.
“The little miss perfect nerd looks stressed,” he says as he sits down. He then extends his hand and the cigarette toward me. “Want to share? It’ll help you relax.” The grossed-out look on my face must tell him enough, because he laughs and brings it to his mouth, taking another puff.
“It doesn’t look like it’s relaxing you.”
He smirks at that, but that smirk is half-dead at arrival.
There isn’t any heart behind it. “I don’t think I’m capable of relaxing anymore.
” He fiddles with the joint in his fingers as he stares off into space.
“You can only chase the high so much before you start to get numb, and you need more and more. Nothing relaxes me anymore.” He must think on it, remembering something.
He glances at me. “Well, maybe one thing.”
He might not say it, but I know what he means: sex.
“Problem is,” Logan goes on with a hard frown, “I can’t seem to get there anymore. It’s gotta be your fucking fault, somehow.” The next time he puffs from his joint, he blows it in my direction, and I gag and wave the air between us.
“Can’t you go smoke that somewhere else?” When he only stares at me, I add, “And what do you mean it’s my fault? How is it my fault you can’t relax?” We barely know each other. It doesn’t make sense. “Man, that smells so bad. How can you relax while breathing in that stuff?”
He groans and makes a big show of dropping the joint to the concrete below and stamping it out with his shoe. “There, happy? You know, I had to pay out the ass for that shit—and I mean shit. I’ve had way better stuff—”
Of course he has. He seems like someone who likes to drink and do drugs and sleep with random strangers all the time. Messing around is probably the only thing Logan is good at. Hey, to each his or her own, I guess, but that could never be me.
“—and it has to be your fault. It sure as shit ain’t mine. I came to this school because I heard the party scene was big. I thought it’d be an easy ride.”
I shake my head. “You can’t blame me for things being harder than you thought they’d be.”
“No, but I can blame you for me not being able to relax,” he shoots back, his tall frame hunched over. “It used to be easy to lose myself in whatever vice I wanted. Drinking, getting high, fucking—then you had to come onto me at that club and give me that fucking look.”
“You’re the one who came onto me, and I don’t know what look you’re talking about. If you want to drink, get high, and see how many girls you can sleep with while here, then go for it. Have fun.” For some reason, it doesn’t sound like my heart is behind my words.
He laughs a bitter laugh. “This shit will never be enough to compare.” He quiets and adds in a hushed whisper I barely hear, “It’ll never be the same.”
“The same as what?”
The look he sends me is sharp and biting, and I flinch under its weight. “None of your fucking business,” he hisses out, sounding like an animal. Vicious, venomous, even violent.
“Why are you so… so—” I suck in a hard breath. “—so rude?”
And he is. He is mean and rude and everything I hate, honestly.
From our very first interaction at the bookstore on campus to now; he’s hardly ever shown an ounce of kindness.
He’s the very opposite of the kind of guy I like—then again, my ex wasn’t as nice as I thought he was, so maybe Logan is exactly the kind of jerk I gravitate towards.
“Why’d you have to look at me like that and fuck everything up?” he shoots back. “Worse than things were already fucked up?”
If there’s one thing this confusing, aggravating conversation is doing, it’s getting my mind off the reason I came outside in the first place. So yay for that, but boo for everything else. I’m getting more and more flustered as the minutes go by.
“I don’t even know what look you’re talking about,” I say, holding out my hands in a surrendering gesture.
“Yeah, like I believe that.”
I groan. This guy… it’s like he has a one-way ticket to my nerves. He knows exactly how to hit them in the quickest time possible.
Logan sits back, turning his face toward me as he studies me again. “You’re awfully dressed up tonight. Looking for another dick to ride?”
“You’re so crass, it’s gross.”
“You didn’t think I was gross when I was inside of you.”
My cheeks immediately heat up, and I can’t hold eye contact with him. I bring my hands to my face, hoping that I can, I don’t know, wipe away the warmth on my face with my palms or something just as silly. “Shut up,” I whisper while still looking away.
“If you didn’t come here for another dick, then why did you come? Call me crazy, but I don’t think parties are your scene.”
With a sigh, I lower my hands to my lap. “I wanted to have fun.”
“Are you?”
This whole conversation reminds me of the one we had at the club, before I decided to spend time with him, only things are different now. It’s been a week and two days, and things are so different.
But, at the same time, they’re still kind of the same. How sad is that?
I don’t know what makes me say it, but I tell him the truth: “No. I don’t know what I wanted out of tonight, but… I can honestly say I didn’t want to see my ex.” I pick at the dress’s bottom hem as I bite the inside of my cheek, the wound in my heart still too raw.
Logan sits a bit straighter when he hears me say that. “Your ex is here?” Don’t know what makes him so interested in that fact, the weirdo.
“Yeah, he’s inside. It’s why I came out here, before he could see me.” I chuckle softly, though that chuckle is full of pain. “Or maybe he did see me, and he pretended not to. I don’t know which one would be worse.”
“We could go inside. You could be all over me. I’m sure we could make the asshole jealous—”
“No,” I say quickly. “No, I don’t think so. What makes you think I’d want to be all over you, anyway?”
This guy is hot and cold. The smirk he gives me right then is legendary, the kind of expression that burns itself into your mind, making itself a permanent home.
“It was only a week and a half ago that you were coming undone for me. Trust me, I could get you there again—with all your clothes still on.”
“You’re insane. Should I bring up your room of guitars just to change the subject?”
Logan scowls at me, that smirk morphing into a frown. Again, he’s hot and cold. “Shut up. You don’t know anything about that. Stop bringing that shit up.”
“Believe it or not,” I say, trying to sound as tough as possible, “you don’t have the right to tell me to shut up about anything.
” Normally I’m the type of person who lets people walk all over me; being firm isn’t a strong point of mine, but this guy makes it easy for me to have a backbone and use it.
I don’t know what that says about us. “Why does it matter if I bring up your guitar room?”
“It’s none of your business. Let it go.”
Whatever he is trying to numb himself from, it must involve music of some kind.
I don’t know what makes me say it, but I find myself telling him something about me.
“My ex and I met through our high school band program. Well, he was in the band. I was in choir. I like to sing. He played the guitar. We, um, bonded over our shared love of music. We had a channel together where we’d record ourselves covering songs.
During the summer, we’d do a new song every week.
No one really watched them, but… I don’t know.
It felt like we were going somewhere, together.
I didn’t think…” I swallow hard. “I haven’t sung a word since the breakup. ”
Logan doesn’t say anything for a long, long time. He stares out at the backyard of the house, looking at nothing in particular. For a while, I wonder if he even heard me, or if he’s lost somewhere in his head, thinking about whatever reason he doesn’t want to talk about his guitars.
Right when I start to wonder whether or not he’s going to say anything at all, he mutters, “Those goddamn guitars. I don’t even play. Not really.”
“For someone who doesn’t play, you have a lot of them.” It doesn’t make much sense to me: if he doesn’t really play, why have an entire room dedicated to them? I don’t get it.
“I can play alright,” he says, shooting me a hard look, the corners of his mouth tugging into a frown, “but I… used to be with other people who could play a lot better.” He kicks the sole of his right foot against the patio below. “I used to sing, too.”
Hearing that this guy could sing makes me wonder if, somehow, I subconsciously knew that already. Is that why I both hated him and felt drawn to him? Why I got irritated by him and never did anything about it? Why I decided to go home with him at the club last week?
“What kind of songs did you sing?” I don’t know why I ask, and I’m well aware the question might send him off the deep end, but I’m curious. I’m suddenly so very curious about this guy. There’s more to him than just being a jerk, and I want to know more.
He chuckles, although it’s a joyless sound. With a shake of his head, he doesn’t say a word, and that’s answer enough. He’s not going to tell me what he used to sing—and that’s fine. It’s not like I’m desperate for the answer, just a bit curious.
As silence permeates the space between us, the sounds of the party inside the house seem to expand and grow louder, and the reminder that I’m not having any fun here is an uncomfortable itch beneath my skin I can’t ever hope to scratch. I run my hands along my dress, then stand.
Logan watches me, finally breaking his silence by asking, “Where are you going?”
“Home,” I say simply, and then I walk away from him as I pull out my phone and send Sloane a message saying just that.
I don’t walk through the house, deciding to walk around its outer edge—obviously, so I don’t have the chance to run into my ex.
The last thing I want to do is come face-to-face with him.
I don’t know if I’m worried that I’ll lose my cool or if I’ll be tempted to forgive him. You know, old habits. He’s familiar. He’s easy. Moving on? Not nearly as easy, but that’s what must be done. It’s what I have to do at this point.
I sigh. So much for a new me this year. Besides hooking up with Logan, what have I done besides run away?