Chapter 19
19
Sydney
I pretended to be asleep when he came in. I didn’t know what else I was supposed to do. It felt like he’d pulled my heart right out of my chest. And then stomped on it. And then kicked it. and then lit it on fire.
“Sydney?” he whispered, crawling into bed behind me. I kept my breathing regular. And my eyes squeezed shut so the tears couldn’t escape.
She is the opposite of what I want.
This was supposed to be pretend. It wasn’t real. I knew that. I told myself that every morning. Every time I opened my eyes and my heart leapt to find him beside me. The stupidest most Sydney Malloy thing I could do would be to fall in love with him.
So, of course, that’s exactly what I did.
I was in love with Wyatt Locke.
Only he didn’t want me. I wasn’t the one for him.
Syd is the last woman on the planet I would ever marry.
There was only one thing to do. Keep the hurt to myself and get off this mountain.
Away from him.
He would never know he’d broken my heart.
The Next Morning
I woke up before everyone else. Sliding out of bed carefully so as not to jostle Wyatt, I quietly packed the tiny amount of stuff I had with me. I’d been living in t-shirts, swim suits and underwear. I had my guitar, my notebooks and my broken heart.
And after going to the bathroom…my period.
I looked down at the smear of rusty red blood and felt like crying.
This really was the end. I mean, I’d been pretty sure there was no chance his precum was that dangerous, but there’d been this tiny spark in my chest. This wee little what if?
Thank God, I told myself, trying to make myself be relieved instead of sad and weird about it. I grabbed one of the tampons I kept in my bag, gathered all my stuff and put it on the porch and waited for everyone else to wake up.
This view from his porch was burned into my brain. The tall cedars, the small lilac bushes at the edge of the clearing. The mountains in the distance. The great gorgeous sweep of bright blue sky.
Before, when people said, go to your happy place, it was easy. I thought of my beach house. The porch and the sunlight and the waves. But it was always lonely.
This had been happy in a different way. In a way I never thought I could be happy.
Wyatt stepped out of the cabin in a pair of sweatpants and nothing else. He handed me a cup of coffee, his own mug in his other hand.
“Sydney,” he said, his voice full of an apology I didn’t want.
“I got my period,” I said, happy I had my big sunglasses on.
“When?”
“This morning.”
“I thought it wasn’t supposed to come for a week?”
“All that sex, I suppose,” I said with a shrug. “You must have jostled something loose.”
He snorted. “That’s not how that works. You really need to brush up on your biology. Are you…okay?”
“Fine,” I said, but I could hear the tightness in my voice. “I’ve got a meeting set up with Marc back in LA and a phone call with the label. I’m sorry, but I really need to head home today. Not tomorrow.”
“Tink, about what you might have heard me say last night-”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. I had spent the last seven years of my life acting. Pretending to feel things I didn’t feel. Pretending not to feel was infinitely harder.
“Don’t worry about it?”
I smiled at him. “You weren’t wrong. Everything you said was true. I don’t belong in your world and you don’t belong in mine.” I said, and turned to stare out at the clearing instead of into his brown eyes. “It’s time for us to get back to reality.”
“I never wanted to hurt you,” he said softly.
“You didn’t,” I lied. And then, because he didn’t believe me, I put my hand over his. “We said friends. Friends until the end.”
That seemed to placate him. He took a sip of coffee and squeezed my hand.
“Friends until the end.”
It was too bad this was the end.
The smell of coffee woke Danny up. He grumbled like a bear coming out of hibernation. All loud roars and big stretches. Absolutely insane hair. He basically barreled his way into the bathroom, and by the time he emerged, his hair and face were combed and he looked mostly human.
“Ah!” He sat down on one of the stools next to me. “That good mountain air,” he said. “Makes for excellent sleeping.”
“That it does,” I said, fake smiling so much my face ached.
“Dad, we need to get back to LA tonight,” Wyatt said. “You’re welcome to stay.”
“Can’t. I’ve got to catch a flight to go see Liam.”
“In Portland?” I asked.
“No, actually, he’s in Calico Cove,” Danny said. Wyatt turned on him with surprise and irritation.
“Is he talking to Nick? Without me? The fuck-”
Danny held up a hand. “You need to check your messages. Swear to god, Wyatt. The world doesn’t stop just because you’re not around trying to control everything.”
I snorted, but stopped when Wyatt glared at me.
Wyatt grabbed his phone off the counter and walked out the door to the little rise beside the cottage. The only place he could get WIFI.
“You okay, girlie?” Danny asked me.
“Never better,” I lied.
Wyatt
Fifteen missed messages and four missed calls from Liam.
I checked the texts first.
Liam: Hey, trying to get ahold of you.
Liam: Don’t want to mess up your honeymoon, but I’ve got a situation.
Liam: Hey! Stop fucking my girlfriend and answer your damn phone.
Liam: Don’t look at that celebrity truth garbage. Call me before you freak out.
Liam: The kid’s not mine.
I called my brother and he answered on the first ring.
“Oh,” he said, “now you fucking call.”
“What is going on?”
“What isn’t going on? While you’ve been honeymooning in the mountains, I’ve had to deal with real shit, Wyatt. Real life shit.”
Real life shit wasn’t Liam’s strongest strength. Hockey, yes. Real Life shit? He tended to throw money at it.
“You’re in Calico Cove?” I asked.
“I am. It’s going great, thanks for asking. Nick is furious!”
“So why’d you go?” I asked, kicking at a yellow weed that was growing in my grass.
“You didn’t listen to any of my messages?”
I growled, a get-to-the-fucking-point growl.
“So I’m babysitting-”
“What now?” I howled with laughter.
“Just listen asswipe, I’m babysitting an old friend’s daughter.”
“Jesus Christ, only you, Liam.”
“What? She needed a favor and I'm helping her out. It’s what I do.”
“Except the media now thinks she’s your kid. Because of that shit that happened last time?”
“Exactly. But here’s the thing, Kit’s saying all this stuff-”
“Kit?” I asked. I only knew of one Kit in Liam’s life. “Geezus Liam, tell me you’re not talking about Kit Barrington, the daughter of the man who fleeced you.”
“Uh… I may or may not have hired her to be the nanny.”
I wanted to throw the phone, but I needed it to yell at him.
“Liam!” I shouted. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
“I needed help! And she owed me. Plus, you and your famous marriage aren’t helping things. I’ve got paparazzi swarming all over me.”
That wasn’t my fault. The paparazzi were all over him anyway, but I imagine after Sydney and I got hitched and then disappeared, he would get a little more heat.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and rubbed my forehead. “But Kit Barrington? Is this smart?”
My brother never said a bad word about anyone. Even referees. But the way he talked about Kit Barrington and her dad stealing his money, made it clear that he hated her. He went out of his way to be mean to the woman and Liam wasn’t mean to anyone.
“It’s all right, Wy,” he said. “But just so you know, I’m in Calico Cove until Tess’s mom gets back. Nick hates me by the way, and Kit…” he trailed off.
“Don’t,” I said, because there was something in his silence that said I’m fucking the con artist’s daughter . “Don’t tell me you’re fucking that con artist’s daughter.”
“Well, technically she’s the nanny.”
“Liam!”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he cried. “I’m fucking up all over the place and I could use my big brother to come and bail me out.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got my own problems,” I said, thinking of the tiny fairy in the house, who was clearly freezing me out because I was an idiot last night.
“Is one of your problems Dad? He said he was going up to the cabin to meet Sydney. I tried to stop him.”
“Not hard enough,” I said and Liam laughed. Shit. I left Syd alone in there with Dad. He could be telling her anything. “Hey, I gotta go. Try not to fuck up too bad and I’ll get there when I can.”
“No promises. And hey, you know I was joking around about fucking my girlfriend, right? I like Syd,” he said. “More than that, I like who you are when you’re around her.”
Yeah. That was the problem. I liked who I was around her too. It’s just too bad it wasn’t going to last.
“Thanks,” I said. “Also, don’t make a mess with Nick.”
“I’m trying,” Liam said. “But he’s not making it easy.”
Less than an hour later I was shutting up the cabin. I didn’t have to turn the water off in the summer, but I made sure everything else was off.
Dad left first, lifting his hand out the window and honking as he drove down the dirt road away from the cabin.
“You ready?” I asked, turning to where Sydney had been standing next to me a minute ago. But she was already in the passenger seat of the Rover. Glasses on, looking at her phone. She might as well have been a million miles away.
Five minutes down the road, the silence was killing me. The old Sydney was a chatter. A hummer. She fidgeted and commented. She told me about weird dreams she’d had and how she thought she would have been an Olympic archer if she’d just been given the chance.
This Syd? Silent.
Glued to her phone.
“You want to put on some music?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“No music? Have you been body snatched?”
She looked up at me with a wan smile. “Sorry, I’m just catching up on some messages from Beatrice.”
“I imagine there are a lot.”
“Six hundred and seven.”
“You’re joking,” I laughed.
“I wish,” she said with a smile, but bent back over her phone. “I’ve told her to cancel your stylist for the award show.”
“Why?”
She turned to me again. “Come on, Wyatt. You don’t really want to go, and since I’m not pregnant, there’s really no reason to keep up this charade. We can put off announcing our divorce, but there is no reason to subject you to the red carpet.”
“But I want to go,” I said, surprising myself that it was the truth. One more night with Sydney, with her on my arm. Watching her being amazing and talented. Respected and adored. How could I not want that?
“You do?” she asked, like she didn’t quite believe me.
“I do. Come on, Tink. If this is the end, then let’s go out with some style.”
I shot her a grin, and to my utter relief she smiled back.
“Okay,” she said. “If you want to.”
I was losing her, but she wasn’t lost yet.