28. Chapter 28
Chapter 28
GRAY
F or Weston’s sake, I acted normal, ate the meal, and joined in conversations, but inside I felt crushed. I was wrong. Elle and Kayley had something in common. They both had the same guilty look in their eyes when their lies had been found out. I thought Elle was different. I couldn’t care less about my car, but the fact that Elle had purposefully deceived me caught me so off guard.
We waved goodbye to everyone, and I held Elle’s door as she climbed into my Jeep. The same car she’d crashed into. My heart took another hit as I shut the door. It all made sense now. She never told me why her van was at the mechanic. I got into my side of the vehicle and started driving us back to the hostel .
In the dim glow of the setting sun, the car’s interior was steeped in shadows. My hands gripped the steering wheel, each detail and stitch feeling cold and coarse under my fingertips. I exhaled slowly, trying to steady the storm of thoughts inside my head. Looking straight ahead, I spoke, “You know, I don’t care about my car. It’s that you lied to me. I told you I cannot tolerate lies, Elle. Why did you do it?”
“I was going to tell you.”
“Said every liar once they’ve been found out,” I said, not bothering to keep the bitterness out of my voice. She shifted uncomfortably in the passenger seat, the distance between us seeming so vast, even though we were confined within this small space.
“I’m not making excuses, but I hate conflict and I’ve struggled to find the right moment to tell you. I’m sorry,” she whispered, so softly that I almost missed it.
“Timelines don’t matter, Elle,” I said, forcing calm into my voice. “The fact is, you lied, and I can’t trust you anymore. If you can lie about something as small as this, what will you do with the big stuff?”
Silence met my question, and I squeezed the steering wheel tighter, lost in a torrent of thoughts .
“You aren’t being fair, Gray,” she said, and I heard the tears brewing in her voice.
The thought of her crying crushed a part of me, but I couldn’t allow myself to be blinded by emotions the way I had with Kayley.
“This all happened so fast. I promise I tried to do the right thing, but relationships aren’t easy for me,” she said.
“Obviously. We should’ve stuck to our sensible rules. We will never work.”
“So that’s it? We’re over?” she asked, with horror in her voice, as if her lying to me was irrelevant.
“I guess. If I can’t trust you, we can’t be together.”
“Okay,” Elle said. I glanced her way and saw what looked like pain in her eyes. Pain? Whatever. She was just playing me like Kayley. Elle stared out the window until we arrived at the hostel. In fact, she didn’t even glance at me when she climbed out.
Was I overreacting? Perhaps. But lying would never be acceptable in my book. I should’ve listened to Weston from the start and never gotten involved with Elle. Argh. Anger at myself eclipsed my every thought.
Instead of pacing the grounds of the hostel, I went for a run. I tried to reason with myself that Elle keeping stuff from me wasn’t a big deal, but I failed. Every which way I looked at the situation, I still felt betrayed.