Chapter 15 Fifteen Bedrooms to Cheat In #3
I shivered at the memory—the memory of the throb I’d felt between my legs when he pushed his erection against me.
He was a greedy bastard, taking anything he wanted.
He didn’t care that someone at the pool might have seen, that my boyfriend might have seen and kicked his ass.
He didn’t care that he’d felt up his own cousin’s girlfriend. He’d wanted to do it, so he did.
But he was just fucking with me, the way he always did, just like when he’d told me about the trip just to start shit.
He liked stirring up shit even more than Carmen.
Unlike her, he didn’t care about consequences, even when they came back on him.
If he’d wanted me, he’d have made a move.
Unlike Devlin, his moral compass was shaky if it existed at all.
That night at the pool, he’d said that to fuck with me, to gloat because I was ogling him.
But if he was just fucking with me, then how come his words about Devlin rang so damn true? Devlin did wish he’d been with someone else. I was sure of it.
My throat tightened as confusion swirled through me.
Devlin was still leaning on my windowsill, watching me with such bone-deep weariness that I knew what I had to do.
Just like I was too much of everything else—too tall, too big, too bright—my love was too much for him.
I could tell by the exhaustion etched in his features.
The weight of my heart was slowly crushing him to dust.
“Maybe, if you want to go off and be free, then you should,” I said quietly. Everything was shaking—my hands, my lips, my voice.
“I didn’t say that,” Devlin said.
“But you do,” I said. “I’ve known it for a long time, since even before we played that stupid game.”
“Why does this feel like one of those tests where there’s no right answer?” he asked.
He looked tired and miserable standing there across the room.
The fact that he wasn’t celebrating the chance at freedom made me feel better, but it also made my heart hurt more.
I didn’t want to do this, to let him go.
But I knew I had to. I had to let him go, and if he loved me, he’d come back to me.
That’s how the saying went. That’s how I proved my love.
And it was how, I hoped, he would finally see that I was it for him too.
“If that’s what you want, then you should have it,” I said. “I want you to have it.”
“You want me to… Have what, exactly?” Devlin asked, his words careful, like he was afraid he’d say the wrong thing and I’d pounce.
I’d never meant to be the kind of girl who made her boyfriend feel that way. I knew he’d never meant to make me feel the way I did, either. None of it was intentional. He just didn’t care quite enough to try harder, and I cared too much.
“Everything,” I said. “I want you to have everything you want, Devlin. Go off with your friends, and if you meet a girl you want, then you should go for it.”
“You’re giving me permission to cheat on you?”
“No,” I said, drawing myself up. “I’m giving you permission to find another girlfriend.”
He swallowed, staring at me with his nostrils flared. For a moment, I wondered if I’d hurt him, if that blow had landed in his heart the way it landed in mine. “You’re… Breaking up with me?” he asked at last, like he couldn’t comprehend such a thing.
And why would he? I had been pathetically, undyingly in love with him for a decade.
“I guess I am,” I said, wiping away a tear.
“For now, at least. Maybe… Maybe just a break. For the summer. You can get it out of your system, and when you get back, we can talk about if we want to get back together. We know what our parents want for us. We’ll end up together, but that doesn’t mean we can’t date other people before then. ”
“You never wanted to do that,” he pointed out. “You said it was pointless.”
“But you want to do it,” I said. “That’s the point. You’ve given me what I wanted for a long time, and I appreciate you doing that for me, so let me do this for you. Let me give you what you want.”
He just stared at me, working his jaw back and forth. Some part of me wanted to scream, wanted to shake him and tell him to say that I was what he wanted, even though I knew I wasn’t. I could only hope once he saw what else was out there, he’d see how good he had it and come back to me.
Finally he nodded and pushed off the windowsill. “Okay,” he said, walking over to me. “I want you to know, that’s still not why I’m going. I really do love you, Doll. You’re a great girl.”
I nodded, unable to speak. I knew I’d start bawling like a baby at any moment.
I closed my eyes, and Devlin leaned down and kissed the top of my head. Then he said the words that tore my heart into a thousand tiny pieces because I knew then, even though I kept denying it for months afterwards, that he was never coming back to me.
“Thank you.”
He whispered the words into my hair, and then he walked out and closed the door quietly behind him.
Our breakup was somehow fitting. There was no big fight in the café at school, no big drama of someone cheating.
It had only taken minutes to end all our years of deep and steadfast love.
It was quiet, almost uneventful, like when we’d made it official after months of dating, and no one even noticed because we’d been hanging out so long by then that everyone assumed we were already together.
I curled into the fetal position and cried.
Peanut jumped up to lick my face, and I pulled her into my arms and sobbed into her soft ears.
My whole life, the future that I’d planned out so neatly, seemed to have just evaporated in minutes.
I knew I’d done the right thing, but it still hurt like only losing a Darling boy could.
I didn’t want to be alone, but the person I’d cried to for the past four years was gone.
I didn’t want to deal with Carmen’s gossip just yet. Word would get around soon enough. We were always in the spotlight. The town would learn about the breakup, and even the moms would gossip about us. I didn’t want it to happen while I was so raw, while it was so new.
I couldn’t call Lacey for obvious reasons.
I could call Becca, but the person I really wanted to talk to was Destiny.
She was my best friend, the friend I’d had since elementary.
Even if we were different in almost every way, she understood me.
She would know what to say, would understand my devastation even if she’d never had a serious boyfriend.
She hadn’t wanted to limit herself. At least she’d lived big while she was here. And if she were here now…
She’d tell me to get off my ass and stop feeling sorry for myself. She’d tell me to go out and do something, go dancing, make out with a guy, forget Devlin’s ass. I could almost hear her still.
“Don’t you dare sit around and mope all summer. We’re going to California!”
We’d talked about it the summer before, in what seemed like another lifetime. It was another lifetime—hers. A whole bright, beautiful light had blinked out since then.
We’d planned to go to California, where I had a second cousin.
She was sure we’d make it big if we just went out there, like we’d be discovered just walking down Hollywood Boulevard.
Knowing her, she would have. That’s the kind of personality she had, the kind of thing that happened to her.
Things always came to her because she knew she deserved them.
When we were kids, I’d been jealous of how lucky she was, how she always won drawings and random things like that.
Until the one night when she didn’t get lucky.
The one time in her life when she drew the wrong straw.
It wasn’t fair. She should get to be here for all of life’s messiness—to fall in love, experience her own breakups and the heartache of loving someone who didn’t feel the same; to cry on a friend’s shoulder and have friends cry on hers; to win and get lucky a million more times, but also to fail more than just once, spectacularly, at the end.
Or maybe she was right. As I lay there feeling like someone was twisting an apple corer down through the center of my chest, I thought maybe it was good life had spared her this torture.
Maybe it was better to live big but stay on the surface, in the sun, instead of sinking down into the dark depths where maybe there was treasure or maybe there was… This.
Destiny had never fallen in love because she’d chosen not to.
I knew she’d felt something for Colt, but she hadn’t wanted it to distract her from other things, so she’d forced herself to keep things casual.
It had kept her from feeling this, let her focus on her dream to be famous and leave her mark on the world.
I’d been happy to think of leaving my mark in the form of children, but she’d wanted so much more.
And she was right. Having children wasn’t a personality trait, wasn’t an achievement.
It was just what people did. I didn’t like conflict, didn’t like decisions.
When my parents told me my future, I’d been happy enough to go along like a cow being herded through the chute of my own life.
But what if I could do more? What if Destiny was right, and I could make her dream of stardom come true? Not just for her, but for me, too.
I’d put all my eggs in Devlin’s basket, and now he was gone. It was time to find some new eggs, new dreams, that didn’t include him.