I felt my mouth drop open with shock at Damien’s admission, and my heart pounded against my chest, but his latter words stuck with me and held my attention.
“Fine,” I hollered, but my voice cracked ever so slightly, indicating that I was going to cry. “Go be with some bitch ’cause I won’t be ’ere when you get back. You say you’re done? Well, so am I!”
Damien humourlessly laughed. “You’ve been done with me for years, and you know it!”
I scrubbed my face with my hands, reliving our fight from a few days ago that still felt too fresh to process.
Damien’s reaction to my relationship with Dante was unexpected, and quite frankly, it frightened me how much I cared that I had hurt him. After Damien asked me out for lunch, I told him I couldn’t go out with him because I was seeing someone, and when I revealed it was Dante, I didn’t care that Aideen had reacted badly to the news, I just cared how Damien reacted to it. He reacted worse than I could have ever imagined, and I reacted out of fear when he walked away from me.
I tried telling myself that I wanted him to walk away from me, I wanted him to be done trying to salvage some sort of bond between us, but then when he did those exact things, I panicked.
He had tried talking to me for months about what happened between us, but I shut him down every single time. And when he walked away from me, I wasn’t surprised that I was suddenly ready to talk. He had changed his mind, though; he didn’t want to talk to me or have anything to do with me. He just threw Dante back in my face, told me he was done with me, and walked away. Afterwards, I immediately went home and spent the remainder of the day crying over Damien.
Something I swore a long time ago I would never do again.
I knew I had done nothing wrong. I was a single woman who could have a relationship with whoever I wanted, but for some reason, the whole situation left a bad taste in my mouth. Not because I was ashamed of hooking up with Dante, but because of his connection to the group. He was my friend’s older brother, he was Kane’s future brother-in-law, and he was Damien and Ryder’s co-worker at C.A.R.—Collins Auto Repair.
I didn’t want things to be awkward with Aideen, and I was afraid they would be now that she was aware I’d been sleeping with her older brother. Damien and Dante were sure to butt heads at work, too. They never liked each other much before they started working together thanks to a big fight the Slater and Collins brothers had a few years ago, so any hope of them suddenly becoming best friends after how Damien reacted to my sleeping with Dante was off the table.
“Everythin’ is so messed up,” I said to the empty room.
I felt like I was being punished when I just wanted to not feel so alone.
Dante was the only other person on God’s green earth who I had been intimate with since Damien, but unlike Damien, I made sure not to form an emotional bond with him. Before, after, or during sex. It was for that reason alone that I had never kissed Dante, not even accidentally.
He knew kissing was a deal breaker for me and was more than happy to oblige that rule if it meant we could tangle between the bedsheets a couple of times a month. Dante joked about my ‘using’ him from time to time, but I knew he was content with our arrangement. He never pushed for more than I offered, and I never offered more than I wanted, and that had worked for us.
Until now.
I sat up and looked down at my phone when it pinged.
What kind of problem?
I sighed. The kind of problem that sees us returning to being just friends.
Barely ten seconds had passed before my phone rang, and a quick glance at my screen showed me it was Dante calling. With a groan and a shake of my head, I answered my phone, placed it against my ear, and lay back down.
“Hi.”
“Shite, you actually answered. I’ve been tryin’ to get in touch with you for days.”
I frowned. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to speak to anyone.”
“Babe, talk to me.”
My lips twitched. “I’m not havin’ phone sex with you.”
Dante barked a laugh. “That’d be weird since we’re just friends now. I mean, we are just friends now, right?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled. “I’m goin’ to need all the courage I can gather to face Aideen now that she knows. I think I’d die altogether if we continued as we were and she confronted us about it.”