Chapter Three
Amber
Shit! Shit! Shit!
Eddie’s at my house.
Not like waiting for me outside the door, but he’s definitely gotten inside somehow, even though he doesn’t even live with me.
Did he break in? I moved the spare key from the last place we hid it because he was always letting himself in.
I didn’t particularly mind, but Poppy hated the fact he just let himself in our duplex without warning.
But that’s just Eddie for you. Because we’re together, he thinks this duplex is part his or something.
Right now, he lives with his dad, but every chance he gets, he’s over at my duplex, stinking up the place with his fresh oil slick stench.
His old, beat-up, Chevy pickup truck is taking up half the driveway, and already creating an oil spot on our pristine concrete.
Damn it, there goes our deposit.
We’ve only been living in the duplex for a few months, but our landlord isn’t always the nicest. She’s a crotchety old woman who only cares about money. I’ll have to work double shifts at the store next week to pay for someone to clean the spot up.
Poppy and Pippa both roll their eyes when we enter.
Eddie’s sprawled across the couch, one leg hanging over the back, the other is propped up on one of Poppy’s favorite throw pillows, a gross, once white sock with holes, greets us as we move further in.
The coffee table’s cluttered with empty beer cans and open bags of food—our food.
Like always, there’s a stupid football game playing silently on our television.
Anytime he’s here, we never have control of the TV.
How long has he been here?
One of his hands is resting on his belly, while the other absentmindedly scratches at his crotch.
There’s a Wolfpack baseball cap covering his face, backwards of course, because I’ve never seen him wear any hat straight, and he’s wearing his signature greasy overalls, which I’m sure is already staining the fabric of our couch.
Not that he cares. When you date a mechanic, you’re bound to get grease somewhere—or everywhere.
I’m not ready to face him. Not yet anyway.
I wanted some time to figure out what I was going to tell him before accepting my fate. Luckily, you can hear his snoring from underneath the hat, and not even closing the door seems to wake the bear from his noisy hibernation.
“How’d he get in here?” Pippa whispers.
“I guess he found the spare key,” I whisper back, remembering to hide it in a different place next time I decide to go out of town.
“What are you going to do?” Poppy asks quietly.
“Hide.”
They both give me a sympathetic look as I quietly retreat to my bedroom, desperate to put some distance between us before he wakes up.
I’m almost to the door, when I hear a raspy hello and feel his warm arms wrap around my waist. He spins me around and mashes his lips against mine, pinning me to his body, practically taking out a few of my teeth with his ferocious kisses.
“I missed you.” His smile is so genuine. You can tell he missed me just by the way his eyes seem to glimmer in the faint overhead light.
There’s no hiding from this now…
Like a gentleman, he opens the door for me and waits until I’m through the door, before he closes it and pushes me towards the bed—ready to make up for the last two days of us being apart.
The guilt is overwhelming. The more I look at him, the more I want to flee and run away from all of this. Unfortunately, he has me trapped between my bed and a fucked-up guilty conscience.
“I missed you too.”
I gulp as he takes my hands and presses his chapped lips against the flesh just past my knuckles. Immediately, he notices the missing silver jewelry that’s supposed to be on my finger.
“Hey, where’s your ring?”
Crap! This is really going to happen, isn’t it?
“I lost it.” At least I was being semi-honest. “I—I’m sorry. I—I looked for it everywhere.” It’s a total lie. I know exactly where I left it and there was no way I was going back for it.
“It’s okay. It didn’t cost me much anyways.” He shrugs his shoulders and nudges me even closer to the bed.
He seriously doesn’t care that I lost my engagement ring? What is wrong with him?
“Let’s get these clothes off. I want to fuck you till you can’t move.
That way you’ll never leave me again.” He tears at my shirt, fumbling with each of the buttons on my flannel until my bra is completely exposed, and a handful of my breast is resting in his palm.
Soft kisses bumble down my neck as he tries to coax me further.
He drank so much that each kiss is peppered with the lingering scent of alcohol.
When he starts to unbutton my jeans, I panic.
Pushing him away, I take a step toward the vanity, afraid of what he will say when I reveal my dirty little secret. There’s no way I can continue this without coming clean. The stain of my sins is crawling over every part of me, and my conscience is far mightier than my need for sex.
“W—We need to talk,” I stutter out, unable to stop the shakes or tears from starting.
“Can it wait? I haven’t seen you in four days.”
Shaking my head, I desperately paw at the tears forming over my eyes, trying to keep composed when I’m shattering apart beneath my skin. My heart’s already breaking, and that’s just from the confusion I see in his eyes.
“Baby, what’s wrong?”
I shake my head again, placing a hand between us so he can’t come any closer, unable to form the words my mouth is refusing to speak, as they befuddle my brain.
“I’m so sorry, Eddie.” I wish I had a bucket to catch these tears of guilt that are leaking down my face in streams.
He looks concerned, but at the same time, there’s a strange anger radiating in his eyes, like he already knows what I’m going to say before I have a chance to get it out.
“Is it about losing your engagement ring? We can get you another one, Amber. It’s no big deal.
I spent fifty bucks on it at Wal-Mart.” This small admission is like a bullet to my heart.
I know the ring looked cheap, but to actually admit he couldn’t spend more than fifty bucks on an engagement ring is only confirming how much of a cheap ass he really is.
Not that Eddie spends his money in the first place.
As far as I know, the man saves practically every dime he has.
For what, I have no fucking clue. But I’m the one who usually pays for dates.
I’m the one who buys groceries and cooks for him all the time.
Hell, the man is in his twenties and still living with his parents.
If that doesn’t tell you how cheap he is, nothing will.
Staring down at my empty finger, I can’t help but realize I own video games that cost more than that damn ring.
“No, it’s not about the ring,” I grumble.
“Then what’s wrong?” he asks. Even though I can smell the soap on his hands, they still look like they’re coated with oil.
Behind his fingernails are over a week’s worth of car grease, and his palms look like they have been scrubbed with black sandpaper.
He runs it through my hair getting tangled in a set of blonde curls. “Tell me what’s going on, Baby.”
“I’m not sure how to tell you this…”
His brow furrows as his smile twitches straight, his jaw set and locked for a fight.
I’ve seen him like this before, and I know what’s to follow, but I have to tell him the truth.
There’s no way I’d be able to live in the sea of lies I’d be constantly treading, if I don’t come clean and tell him what happened in Vegas.
Hesitating, I blow out a frustrated breath before taking another step backward, so I at least feel somewhat safe. “You may want to sit down to hear this.”
He cautiously sits on the edge of the bed, the love in his eyes already dwindling.
This is not going to be good. Not at all.
“Look, Eddie, I love you. I need you to know that first and foremost…”
“I love you too, Amber—”
I cut him off just like he cut off me. It’s almost like he doesn’t want me to say what I’m about to say.
“Just listen, please. I need to be honest with you. I couldn’t live with myself if I wasn’t. I should pretext this by saying I didn’t go to Vegas with ulterior motives, I just wanted to have some fun with my best friends for a few days and not have you breathing down my neck all the time.”
“I don’t breathe down your neck, Amber—”
“Eddie, stop cutting me off and just listen, please. This is fucking important.”
He crosses his arms, remaining silent.
“I seriously don’t know what happened last night.”
His eyebrows arch as his hands drop to his sides.
“Go on.”
His jaw is already ticking, that’s not good. Not good at all. He only does that when he’s about to explode.
He’s never been violent with me, but there have been times he’s scared the shit out of me with his temper. If I thought he’d been angry before, the volcano that erupts next will be one for the books—a super volcano in the making.
“Everything that happened last night is a complete blur. I don’t remember shit, only what happened after I woke up this morning…”
His teeth grinding breaks the silence before he says, “What did you do, Amber?”
“None of this was planned, Eddie. You have to believe me. I seriously don’t know how I ended up where I did when I woke up this morning.
Poppy and Pippa were gone and I…” The spiral overtakes me as my anxiety begins to spin, choking me alive as I fight to get the words out that I know will break us.
Nothing is going to stop this train wreck from derailing, not even me.
“I found myself in a different hotel this morning. Only, I wasn’t alone. I was in bed with some guy.”
Eddie rockets up from the bed, fists clenched, his voice a husky mess of frustration and anger. “What the fuck? Who? I’m going to kill him,” he growls.
“I don’t know. I think I may have been drugged.”
He takes off his hat and runs his hand over his short brown hair. I miss the fact that it isn’t long anymore, I used to love running my fingers through it.