Chapter 4 #2
“If it didn’t fucking matter, Olivia, I wouldn’t be asking, now would I?
” He made it halfway across the room before pivoting and heading for the door again.
“So, what was it? Were you bailing on him early?” His tone hardened, the points of every letter sharpened with a brand new nail file.
“I’ll be damned if I sit around and watch you take advantage of him. ”
Here we went again.
What the hell was he talking about?
Was Lennon good to me in every other way than when those moments of infidelity pushed through, yes.
He was kind, sweet, and so generous, but I was equally all of those things as well.
I didn’t take, take, take from his brother while giving nothing in return.
I gave him my damn heart, so how dare Weston imply such a distasteful act.
“You have a lot of nerve. Walking back and forth like you’re too good to be in the same room as me and accusing me of taking advantage of your brother when you’ve seen us together.
When you’ve had a front row seat to it just as much as any other person.
When you were in that conference room seeing the same things I was,” I said, trying to get Weston to see reason.
To get him to recall how Lennon was acting.
Celeste had been nosing around, pushing boundaries, and getting close to his brother while he was still in the room.
“Maybe I have just enough nerve,” he said, those eyes darting to mine when he swept around and walked in my direction again. “Hard to believe otherwise when I have proof of you bailing on him tonight.”
“You’re forgetting that you’re here, too. Maybe you’re the one who ‘bailed’ on him. I wouldn’t put it past you to deflect in order to make yourself feel better. So you don’t have to face the guilt of your choices.”
He grinned then, showcasing that drop-dead gorgeous smile of his. The same one I got on so few occasions and only knew from memory. But now… Now I’d be able to refresh those memories.
His lips pulled high, that dimple creasing his cheek on one side of his face.
It was a shame that he wasn’t the charming Taylors brother. Because if it wasn’t for his bad attitude, he’d have just as many women clawing at him as Lennon did. Maybe it was a good thing he didn’t. That way only one woman was being duped instead of two.
My stomach fluttered at the thought. What followed was this weird sense of jealousy that I didn’t want to think about.
“I came to use the bathroom,” he said.
“Bullshit. You have one in your office that you can use. In fact, I don’t think anyone has ever seen you use the one in here.
Besides, you were gone for way too long to claim you were only using the restroom.
” I didn’t realize, until he spoke, that I laid down my cards for him to see.
That I gave him fuel for the fire he started earlier.
“Keeping tabs on me?”
“No.”
“Then what would you call that?”
“Being mindful of my surroundings,” I quipped, although it really didn’t come out funny at all. It was more sarcastic than anything.
“Sure, let’s call it that.”
I wanted to scream.
My chest turned heavy from the weight of this push and pull with him.
This was exactly why I didn’t want to talk.
Why I thought silence would be better. He had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
If we really wanted to label someone with the title of adulterer, he should have been looking at his brother. Not me.
“Watch what you’re saying, Weston,” I warned.
“Or what, Olivia?”
My nostrils flared, and my hands balled in my lap. I was up on my feet in the next second, walking over to the fridge so I could get myself another small water. I wasn’t sure if I was going to drink it or throw it at Weston’s head. Both would be effective uses of it.
I bypassed him on the way, trying my best to ignore his ignorant ass and the way my head felt airy all the sudden.
My vision tunneled a tiny bit. I yanked the fridge door open, the suction of it sounding in the quiet space around us.
It was dark inside the appliance. Another reminder that the power had yet to return.
“I’m speaking to you,” Weston said behind me. Like I needed the reminder of his accusations. They were fresh in my mind. Front and center the way he probably liked them.
“And I’m done speaking to you.”
I twisted the cap off and sipped water out of the bottle.
Then, I turned on my heel, my attention dead set on the chair I claimed a while ago as I blinked through what felt like an aura that creeped into the sides of my vision.
It took shape in the form of a zigzag and tunneled my peripheral in a way that made my body tense.
My plan was to wait this out. Maybe I’d close my eyes and try to sleep. Pretend Weston wasn’t in the room so he’d take the hint and not speak to me.
But as I was crossing the room, fingers that weren’t my own curled around my elbow.
My body was gently jerked back. When I turned to find the source, I found Weston’s steely gaze on me.
Those eyebrows of his were furrowed the slightest bit, and my stomach lurched—from him but also from whatever the hell was going on with my body.
My feet may have been on the ground, but it was almost like I was walking on a wall instead. The room took on this spinning nature, dizziness swirling through my head with this intensity that was hard to push away.
The tension that soaked the room found a mind of its own, collecting in a figurative bucket that tipped over above my head, like some trick or sneaky way to humiliate me.
My heartbeat picked up about three notches, and I swallowed hard.
The sensation of being on edge all evening magnified, making me feel like I was dangling from a cliff.
A cliff that acted as a bordering line between Lennon and Weston—between brotherhood and this weird energy that ebbed and flowed when I was around Weston.
Because as much as I wished everything was perfect between Lennon and me, the truth was that it wasn’t. But even while knowing all of that, I couldn’t stand there and say that my body didn’t respond to the broody, grumpy individual tugging at my arm.
I almost hated it when my stomach dipped super low then transcended into the clouds when he pulled me an inch toward him.
Realistically, we could’ve been closer, but this…
this was far too close as it was. The kind of closeness that would have put me in a predicament with Lennon if he saw it, especially since the other person was his damn brother.
I tried to calm the way my breathing turned faster.
Tried to keep it as inconspicuous as possible so Weston wouldn’t notice.
Logic told me he probably already did. He wasn’t dumb.
If anything, he was the smartest person who worked in this building, and he was perceptive.
I had no doubt that he could read a person well enough to know how they were feeling at the most basic level, even if he did put his foot in his mouth half the time.
His jaw clenched, those muscles in his cheeks rippling from what I could make out. He rolled his tongue against the inside of his bottom lip then spoke in an almost demanding way. “Don’t ignore me. I don’t like it.”
“I don’t owe you anything,” I spit back, ripping my arm free. “Which means I’ll do whatever I damn well want.”
“No,” he said quickly, stepping in front of me when I tried to walk back to my seat. It almost felt like I was moving in slow motion. Everything around me slowed down as Weston said, “You’re not going to run away when you’re called out.”
“I haven’t taken advantage of Lennon,” I managed to get out.
“Stop insinuating that I have. It’s insulting, and quite frankly”—my vision went all weird again, and I tried to blink through it—“not something I deserve to be accused of when I’ve only ever been faithful to him—under your watchful eye and otherwise.
” My brain seemed to slow down. Like it couldn’t properly think of what to say.
It was difficult, almost like trying to lift up your arm when you laid on it for half the night. “Now…get out of my way.”
“Fine,” Weston relented. “Let’s say you haven’t done anything wrong. It doesn’t change you leaving that room or the fact that you had those eyes on someone that wasn’t him.”
“I’m not discussing this with you anymore.” I went to walk around him, but he crowded my space again. My hand tightened around my water bottle, and this growing sense of anguish filled my chest, my entire damn body.
I was angry with him. Beyond fuming over the words that were coming out of his mouth and what he was implying. But my heart also hiccuped under the very real truth regarding his brother—of which he didn’t know.
He was labeling me with a title that was meant for someone who he shared DNA with.
I had kept it mostly a secret because I didn’t want to put Lennon in a bad light. At the end of the day, I still cared about him regardless. I wasn’t the kind of person who was spiteful and wanted others to hurt because I was. I didn’t want people looking at him like he was a sleazeball.
But with every word Weston said to me, it became increasingly harder to bite my tongue.
“Your words make you all the more guilty,” Weston sneered.
I didn’t know what happened then, but a wave of fury hit me all at once. My water bottle fell from my hand, thudding to the floor before it rolled a few feet away from us. Weston’s threat was very obvious and hung in the air right in front of my face.
His words broke the camel’s back and found a way into my heart, finishing off the cracks that Lennon started.
Maybe if I looked at it from another angle, I’d realize that Weston was only trying to protect his brother.
In the wrong way, no doubt, but still. He was telling me he cared about him and that he didn’t want to see him hurt.
It was another reason why I believed he really did have a heart. It just didn’t exist when it came to me.
My mind, body, and soul tried to go on the defensive, but my movements were sluggish, my words trapped in my throat as I tried to speak them. My body broke out into a cold sweat, every part of me turning clammy.
What the hell was happening?
My lips parted slightly. Weston stood there, his eyes downcast and settled on me. His face was expressionless, but then those thick, dark brows of his twisted into a line of concern.
Weston’s voice sounded a million miles away when he said my name.
My eyelids fluttered, my sight waning in and out as this intense feeling of nausea claimed my stomach. I tried to blink, tried to push through it, but anything I did, including my breathing, turned suspiciously snaillike.
“Oliv—” he said again, but I didn’t get to hear the end of it.
My entire body tightened with unease and then that woozy, lightheaded feeling that came whenever I had a migraine with an aura episode crashed into me. My body morphed into a thousand pounds, my arms and legs turning super heavy as my peripheral vision blurred and merged into my surroundings.
And everything…
in the room…
faded.