Chapter 11
eleven
. . .
Meghan
Holy shit.
My pulse pounded in my ears as I tried to process what just happened. Wick and Marco, their hands and mouths all over me, driving me to dizzying heights of pleasure. The way they’d touched each other, the raw hunger in their eyes as they’d kissed. It was like something out of my wildest fantasies, a forbidden desire I’d never dared voice.
Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit.
Shame and confusion crashed over me in waves. What the hell had we done? What did this mean for our already complicated relationships? For my friendship with Wick, for the tenuous connection I’d been building with Marco?
Wick was the first to move. He stumbled back from me and raked a hand through his disheveled hair, his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath. “Fuck. Fuck, I can’t—I have to go.”
He turned and strode away from us with purposeful steps. The cold fist of panic tightened around my heart. He couldn’t leave. We needed to talk about what had just happened. “Wick, wait!” I called out, my voice thin and desperate.
He didn’t slow down, didn’t even glance back over his shoulder. He just kept walking, his head bowed and his broad back disappearing into the shadows of the enclosure.
I looked at Marco, silently begging him to do something, anything. He held up his hands and shook his head. “Don’t look at me, Meg. This is between you two.”
I wanted to scream at him that he was just as much a part of this as Wick and I were. He didn’t get to just wash his hands of the whole mess. But I didn’t have time to argue with him. Not when Wick was getting further away with each passing second.
So I hitched up my dress and took off after him, inwardly cursing my impractical heels. I heard Marco’s footsteps behind me, but I didn’t spare him a glance. All my focus was on finding Wick and making him talk to me.
By the time I caught up to him near the zoo’s exit, my lungs were burning and my feet ached. I reached out, grabbing his arm to spin him around. “Wick, please. We need to talk about this.”
He wrenched his arm out of my grasp, his eyes wild. “There’s nothing to talk about, Meghan. What just happened was a mistake. A huge fucking mistake.”
All the air rushed from my lungs. “A mistake?” I echoed. “Is that really how you see it? Because from where I was standing, it didn’t feel like a mistake. It felt... right.”
Wick let out an incredulous laugh. “Right? Jesus Christ, Meghan. You just had your hand on my cock while I let another man kiss me. What part of that seems right to you?”
I winced at his crude words, at the self-loathing dripping from every syllable. But I refused to back down, to let him push me away again. “The part where we finally stopped lying to ourselves,” I said. “The part where we gave in to what we’ve both been feeling for so long. The part that’s real .”
For a moment, I thought I saw something flicker in his eyes. A flash of the same desperate yearning that consumed me. But then his expression hardened. “No, Meghan. It’s not real. It can’t be. I won’t let it be.”
“Why not?” I demanded, my voice rising with each word. “Why are you so determined to fight this? To fight us?”
“Because it’s wrong!” He exploded, his shout ringing out in the empty parking lot. “Don’t you get that? I’m your brother’s best friend. I’m supposed to protect you, not...not...”
“Not what, Wick? Not want me? Not care about me? Because newsflash: you already do. You have for a long time, even if you won’t admit it to yourself.”
He shook his head, his jaw clenched so tight I could see a muscle ticking in his cheek. “It doesn’t matter how I feel. It can’t happen, Meghan. I won’t betray Emmett like that.”
“So what, then? We just go back to pretending? To lying to ourselves and everyone else?” Hot tears welled in my eyes, but I blinked them back furiously. “I can’t do that anymore, Wick. I won’t.”
“You don’t have a choice.” His voice was flat, emotionless. “This ends now, before it goes any further. Before we do something we can’t take back.”
Before I could reply, Marco appeared beside us, his expression grim. “She’s right,” he said quietly. “You can’t keep running from this, man. Sooner or later, you’re gonna have to face the truth. About Meghan, about yourself. About us. ”
Wick stiffened. “There is no us, Marco. What happened back there, it didn’t mean anything.”
Marco smiled coldly, shaking his head. “Keep telling yourself that. But we both know that’s bullshit. You felt it just as much as I did—the connection. The way everything just clicked into place.”
I stared at him. Was he saying what I thought he was saying? That he had feelings for Wick, too? That he wanted...what, exactly? A threesome? A relationship?
My head spun with the insanity of it all. How had my life turned into some smutty romance novel in the space of one night? And why did the idea of being with both Wick and Marco simultaneously terrify and thrill me?
Wick must have seen the conflicting emotions playing out on my face because he took a step back, his expression shuttering again. “No. No fucking way. I’m not...I can’t do this.”
His long legs ate up the ground as he practically fled the scene. I watched him go, my heart sinking in my chest.
Marco sighed and clasped his hands behind his neck. “Well, that went well.”
I shot him a dirty look, not in the mood for his particular brand of sarcasm. “This is all your fault. If you hadn’t pushed him...”
“Hey, don’t put this on me. I didn’t force him into anything he didn’t already want. He’s just too chickenshit to admit it.”
My retort died on my tongue. Much as I hated to admit it, Marco was right. Wick had been just as caught up in the heat of that moment as we had been. No matter how much he might want to, he couldn’t lay all the blame on Marco.
“So what do we do now?” I asked, hating the tremble in my voice. “How do we fix this?”
Marco blew out a breath, his expression bleak. “I don’t know if we can, Meg. Wick’s got a lot of shit to work through—his feelings for you, his loyalty to your brother, his own fucked-up hang-ups about his sexuality. It’s not gonna be easy.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, suddenly exhausted. “I know. But I can’t just give up on him, Marco. I…I love him.” The words were strange on my tongue, foreign and yet achingly familiar.
A look of resignation crossed Marco’s face. “You should probably go after him.”
“But, I…I don’t want to just leave you.”
“I’m fine. I’m going back to the party.” Marco hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “But, before I forget…” He pulled my panties from his pocket and placed them in my hand, curling my fingers around them. His carefree, playboy mask slid firmly back in place as he shot me a wink, then turned to walk back to the reception.
I stood motionless, unsure of which man to chase after. I wanted to pull Marco back and tell him that I cared for him, too. That the connection we shared wasn’t just physical. It was something deeper, something real. But even as the words formed on my tongue, I couldn’t say them. Not now. Not when Wick was out there somewhere, hurting and alone.
Wick. My one constant in a life filled with uncertainty and change. The friend who had held me when I cried, who had made me laugh until my sides ached, who had always been there, even when I didn’t deserve it.
And now, after all these years, I finally understood why. Why he had never pushed me away, even when I’d been at my worst. Why he had always looked at me with that soft, tender expression, even when I was too blind to see it for what it was.
I couldn’t let him walk away. Not when we were so close to finally being honest with each other. I gathered up my dress and raced through the parking lot, heedless of the panties still clutched in my fist. Wick was opening the door to an Uber, his broad shoulders slumped in defeat.
“Wick, wait!” I called out. He froze with his hand on the door handle, but he didn’t turn around. I slowed to a stop a few feet away, struggling to catch my breath. “Wick. Don’t go,” I pleaded. “We need to talk about this.”
For a horrible moment, I feared he would get in the car and drive away, leaving me standing there. Instead, he opened the door and motioned for me to get in.
We rode in tense silence. The trees and streetlights streaked by in a blur, but I barely noticed, my mind consumed with the man beside me. The heat of his body. The tension radiating off him in waves. He stared straight ahead, refusing to even look at me.
When we arrived at the hotel, he led me through the lobby, his hand hovering at the small of my back, not quite touching but guiding me, nonetheless. The elevator ride was suffocating, the mirrored walls reflecting our strained expressions back at us from every angle. I watched as the numbers ticked upward, each floor bringing us closer to the inevitable confrontation.
His room was on the twelfth floor. He slid the keycard into the lock with a soft click. The door swung open to reveal a dimly lit space that seemed more like a cage than a sanctuary.
Wick shrugged off his jacket, tossing it over the back of a chair before turning to face me. His hazel eyes were stormy and conflicted.
“Wick...”
He held up a hand, silencing me. “Don’t, Meg. Just...don’t.” His voice was strained, as if each word was being dragged from some deep, dark place inside him .
I moved closer, my fingers itching to reach out for him. But he retreated, his back hitting the wall as he shook his head. “We can’t do this. I can’t do this,” he said. “Emmett is my best friend. I can’t betray him.”
“But what about what you want, Wick? What about what we want?”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “What I want doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. Not when it means hurting the people I care about.”
“But you’re hurting me , Wick. You’re hurting me.”
“You think I don’t know that, Meg? You think this is easy for me? I’ve spent the past year trying to bury these feelings, to convince myself that what I felt for you was nothing more than a stupid crush. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t escape it. I can’t escape you .”
“Then stop trying, Wick. Stop fighting it. We can figure this out together, we can?—”
“No, we can’t!” His voice echoed off the walls. “Don’t you get it, Meg? There is no ‘we’. There can’t be.”
I shook my head vehemently, tears blurring my vision.
“I think you should go.”
I stared at him in disbelief, my mouth opening and closing soundlessly as I struggled to form a coherent thought. But he simply pushed off the wall, opening the door with his head hung, waiting for me to leave.
I elbowed past him, throwing as much venom behind my next words as I could. “You’re a fucking coward.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know, Meg.”