Falling for You (7 page)

She wasn’t this woman—this impulsively reckless woman who got fucked by a stranger on the beach in the dark. What had he said about his beach house? And other people?

How would he introduce her? As the woman who’d just given him her virginity without offering her name or asking for his?

This is shock. I’m going into shock.

She couldn’t do this. She had to get out of here.

Standing shakily, she began to distance herself from the ocean she’d almost walked into. A group of what sounded like teenagers passed behind her, laughing softly and talking about the party they were heading to. She maneuvered around them and practically ran the few feet to the closest beach house—a dark-blue, well weathered, clapboard two-story with a detached garage. She stole around the edge of the garage and peeked back to where she’d last seen her sexy stranger. With each step, she expected to hear a man yell out for her, but what could he yell?

He didn’t know her name.

I
have nowhere to go.

It was the only thought permeating the haze of shock that still clouded her mind the next morning. She’d waited until her she was fairly certain her sexy stranger had made his way back to his beach house before walking back to The Atlantica sans shoes.

The place had been practically deserted. The decorations were gone. The wedding was officially off.

A student from a local community college was currently subletting the apartment she’d shared with her mom while Brenda Buchanan was in rehab. Fate had been thankful to have the rent covered. Now, she wished she could run back home and hide. But she couldn’t. Trevor or no Trevor, she had a job in New York, one she now needed desperately.

I have a job. That’s a good thing. I just have nowhere to live.

That was the primary issue at the moment, one she had no idea how to deal with. Trevor had a place in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She did not.

A knock on the door of the bridal suite startled her out of her depressing thoughts. Fate stilled in the midst of zipping her now unnecessary wedding dress into the garment bag.

She’d sneaked back in late last night, counting her lucky stars that no one had seen her. It looked as if her luck had run out. Her heart picked up the pace like a wild racehorse competing for the Triple Crown.

“Fate?”

The voice was soft, heavy with grief, and female.

Closing her eyes, Fate took several deep breaths. She fisted her shaking hands and walked over to the door. When she opened it, a redhead with red-rimmed eyes stood on the other side.

“He’s not in here with me, Melissa. He’s all yours. I’m on my way out.”

Her former best friend’s lower lip trembled. “I-I’m not here for him. I’m here to talk to you. I know you probably don’t care what I have to say, but I thought it might do us both some good to clear the air.” After a deep breath, the other woman added a, “Please,” to her offer.

Fate frowned, trying to decide if she was strong enough to stomach Melissa’s detailing the events that had led to this nightmarish catastrophe of epic proportions.

After a few tension-filled seconds, she decided that knowing was better than not knowing despite the fact that it made no difference either way. What was done was done.

“I saw enough to put the pieces together,” Fate began, opening the door wider. “But if there’s something else you need to say, I won’t stop you.”

Melissa let out a strangled cry of relief. “I know this doesn’t matter now, but I never wanted to hurt you. I don’t think Trevor did either.” She stepped past Fate into the room and gestured to the bed. “Can we sit?”

“You can,” Fate said, moving to the side near the vanity table and folding her arms.

Melissa lowered herself onto the bed and used an already wadded tissue from her hand to dab her eyes. She wasn’t sobbing, but her eyes seemed to be perpetually filled with tears.

“It started last year—right after Ethan proposed.”

Fate’s chest constricted. Ethan and Melissa had ended things more than six months ago. So for at least half a year, the past one hundred and eighty days or so, her fiancé and best friend had been sleeping together. It didn’t feel good to know.

“Okay. Well, thanks for the timeline. Is that all?”

Melissa shook her head. “I made a mistake. Several actually. The rumors are true. I cheated on Ethan. I had this strange fear that, somehow, once we were married, we’d fall into a mundane routine and I’d suffocate. I just… I wanted one last fling, you know?”

Fate didn’t know. She had no idea why someone would cheat on a man like Ethan. He was handsome and successful, and he had adored her friend from what she’d seen.

“You and I are very different people,” was all she could offer.

“I plan weddings for a living, Fate. And I keep up with some of my clients. Marriage felt terrifying to me. Like a trap, like a place where everything that made me
me
would be sucked out and I’d just become Ethan’s wife and nothing more. I can’t explain it beyond telling you that I felt like I was losing myself and I went out one night with my friend, Alicia. We were just flirting and being ridiculous—giving guys fake names and numbers and acting impulsively.” She glanced around the room as if looking for an alternate ending to her story, but Fate could already feel the impending betrayal. “We had too much to drink. Alicia had a steady bed buddy that she called and left to go see and I just kept drinking. Right before last call, I saw him sitting with a few friends of his and I… I don’t know what I thought would happen but...”

Fate could see it. She could see a drunken Melissa stumbling over to Trevor and his friends in a bar, basically propositioning him. He had been sexually frustrated due to her stipulation about waiting, so it probably hadn’t taken much convincing.

“He was just…familiar. Safe. I only asked him to give me a ride home. I never meant for it to…to go that far.”

The confession was whispered, but Fate felt as if it had been screamed at her. She didn’t want to hear anymore, but she couldn’t seem to get her mouth to form the words to make Melissa stop talking.

“It was just supposed to be one time. And then…it wasn’t.”

Fate nodded, working her tongue over her lips to wet them so that she could speak. “Apparently Ethan is a lot smarter than I am and figured it out long before I did.”

Melissa averted her eyes, suddenly very interested in the room’s décor. “I kept the details from you for a reason. I called off my engagement myself. I told Ethan the truth. Not that it was Trevor, but that I’d been unfaithful and had feelings for someone else.”

Each of her friend’s admissions had felt like stinging slaps to the face, but this one was more of an unexpected punch to the gut.

“You have feelings for Trevor? So it wasn’t just about sex then?” Fate didn’t know if this made the situation any better or worse. Felt like maybe a little of both and neither at the same time.

Melissa’s eyes brimmed with tears that fell as she nodded. “I’m sorry. God, Fate. I’m so sorry. I tried… I tried to just stay away—tried to throw all of my energy into helping you with the wedding as if that would somehow make what I had done okay. But being here, knowing I was going to have to stand up there and watch him marry my best friend—it was killing me. That’s all I can say about the horrible thing I did to you—the horrible thing I would’ve kicked anyone else’s ass for doing to you.” Her words became muffled through the sobs as Melissa lost control of her emotions mid-explanation. “I told him how I felt, but he said you were the one for him and that his family wouldn’t tolerate a broken engagement.”

Fate snorted out a laugh. “Looks like they’re going to have to tolerate it after all.”

Melissa nodded. “His mother hates me. She knew… She caught me sneaking out of his apartment one morning. She glared daggers at me all through your bridal tea last month.”

Speaking of daggers, Fate felt like another one was stabbing her in the back every time Melissa spoke. Everything hurt to hear. Every word seemed to have teeth and each sentence was punctuated with a piercing bite. This wasn’t helping anyone. Maybe Melissa was getting some relief in clearing her conscience, but Fate was done listening. None of it changed anything. There were no magic words that would repair the past and erase what had happened.

“I think I’ve heard enough,” she said quietly.

“Do you—” Melissa hiccupped. “Do you hate me?”

Fate’s forehead creased and her eyebrows, which had been shaped and sculpted for the wedding that was not to be, threaded inward while she tried to determine the answer.

“I hate what you did. I hate that you and Trevor did what you did and that I found out the way that I did. As for how I feel about you…”

There simply weren’t words to describe it. Fate was angry with the woman, filled with soul-stinging hurt and betrayal by what she’d done. She was even angrier with herself because some miniscule section of her heart felt sympathy for Melissa. She felt bad that her former friend had been rejected, as if that were just a conditional response her heart had before her brain carried the details of the situation to the party.

Melissa’s wide green eyes held hope until Fate spoke again.

“With everything I’m dealing with—a broken engagement, a mother in rehab, and impending homelessness—I don’t think I have the energy to walk around hating you.” She sighed loudly and moved over to the door. “But I don’t want to know you anymore, Melissa. Honestly, it’s a good thing that I’m moving because I don’t want to see you or speak to you or have anything to do with you.” Fate twisted the doorknob, doing her best to force some semblance of a smile at the woman sitting on her bed. “I need to finish packing,” she said, hoping she wouldn’t have to say anything else.

Melissa stood as Fate held the door open for her.

“In a way, I’m almost glad you caught us.” Melissa must’ve heard Fate’s sharp intake of breath because she rushed on. “Not because I’m glad you got hurt. Or that I ruined your wedding. Just because I think you deserve better. Better than Trevor and better than me. I really do hope things work out for you in New York.”

She appreciated the sentiment, but well wishes from the woman she’d caught screwing her fiancé strangely had no impact on her.

“Goodbye, Mel,” Fate said quietly.

Melissa didn’t say goodbye or make any more awkward pleas of forgiveness. She just nodded with the corners of her mouth pulled downward and left with even redder eyes than she’d come with. Fate closed the door to the suite and leaned against it for support.

Her heart ached in her chest, and she thought of the talk shows her mother used to watch when she was a kid. Her mother liked the trashiest ones, the paternity test results episodes mostly. Fate hated them, hated being in the room when they were on. Something was seriously messed up with people revealing hugely personal secrets in front of a live studio audience. But she kind of understood how some of them felt now.

I never thought this could happen to me.

She remembered a woman who’d thought she’d been brought to the show for a makeover only to find out her husband was sleeping with her twin sister and the sister was pregnant with his baby. The woman had sat there, shell-shocked and devastated.

Fate recalled wondering what in the hell one did when faced with a situation like that—an earthquake splitting your life clean in half. Before and after.

Now, she knew what one did.

One packed her shit and left.