Chase doesn’t give me that chance. “We haven’t what? What has neither of us done? Because I’ll be honest, Leighton, it feels like I’ve tried to do a lot lately and you’ve been everywhere but here with me.”
Closing my eyes, I fist my hands and bury them under my legs. “We haven’t really been talking about anything,” I tell him, voice too somber for the mood of the conversation. “You knew I wasn’t any good at the dating thing because I’ve had no experience at it, but I wanted to try.”
“Wanted to?”
Nibbling the inside of my cheek for a moment, I peek up at him. “We were really good friends. You were the first friend I had here who I didn’t think felt obligated to be with me for any reason.”
He jerks back, jaw slack. “Friends?”
Aren’t we? Before I can ask, he laughs, but it’s the unamused kind. Dry. In disbelief. “Is this because of what happened with Kyler that night? We haven’t been the same since then, which makes no sense considering your still buddy-buddy with the person who caught us doing it. It isn’t like we fucked, Leighton! He could have walked in on worse.”
Blood drains from my face. “I don’t want to talk about—”
His voice raises as he paces his side of the room, stopping to stare at me with hard eyes for a moment. “Of course you don’t! You never want to talk about it. Like always, I have to drag the conversation out of you.”
Warmth fills my chest, and I don’t have time to figure out if it’s in embarrassment or something else. “It wasn’t easy to talk about.”
He steps forward but stops himself. “If it was so hard to talk about with me, then why is it so easy for you to run back home and pretend like it never happened with the person who saw me doing it to you?”
The flush is furious on my face. “Chase, I don’t—”
“No! I went down on my girlfriend and got caught. If you don’t think that’s embarrassing as hell for me too then you’re mistaken. But I moved past it like I thought we were both going to do, except I actually did something to prove that. Do you think I wanted to show my fucking face to the guy who looked like he wanted to murder me that night? No. But I showed up to talk to him for you because I know how much Kyler means to you.”
My eyes grow big. “What are you talking about? You never told me you went to see him.”
His hands go to either side of his neck, gripping it as he expels a breath. “It wasn’t important. What was said had to be between him and me. And it was. The point is, not once have you shown any effort to actually move on from it.”
I want to tell him that’s not true, but instead, I stupidly blurt, “Is this because we haven’t fooled around since then?”
The gaping expression on his face tells me my mistake instantly. “Garrick was right,” he states, shaking his head again and giving me his back to look out the window.
What does Garrick have to do with this?
He blows out another long breath, but the muscles of his back are still tense. Shoulders drawn back as he leans against the wall, he murmurs, “None of this is about us not fooling around, Leig
hton. I’ve been willing to wait as long as you needed to.”
He’s never pushed. “I know you have.”
“So why,” he asks, turning to me slowly with eyes that pin me to the seat, “does it feel like you’re trying to make excuses to end this?”
Something inside me untethers, and the reality of this situation floods the room. “W-What?”
His tongue swipes over the closed seam of his lips as he makes his way back over to the cushion he occupied before. “Ever since I talked to Garrick about…” A shoulder lifts. “He’s the type to be brutally honest with people, especially me. I never listened to him before, but I should have. I see my error. Silly me.”
My mind wraps around one thing, and one thing only. “You told him about what happened between us?” The rising octave of my tone makes him stare at me with an unreadable expression.
“You told Mia,” he points out.
“Because I needed her!”
“And I didn’t need my brother?” he yells back, making the distant chatter in the house dull. He’s standing again, and so am I. “You’re not the only one who gets to confide in people, Leighton. I needed to talk to somebody, and that someone happened to be him, because I finally met someone I liked. Someone I thought liked me back, but I’m obviously an idiot.”
Garrick knows what happened. My chest tightens and I feel familiar nausea take over my stomach, creeping up my throat. He knew when he talked to me at the set of Hot in Hollywood—when he warned me away from his brother.
“Oh my God,” I croak.
Chase scoffs at me. “It doesn’t feel great, does it? Knowing that people are willing to talk to anybody but you about something private.”