In it, Caleb’s sitting on a barstool, with Beck standing there waving a dollar bill. And between them, sitting on the bar itself, is a woman who must be Kate.
She has red hair falling nearly to her waist, almond-shaped eyes and a coy smile. Her dress is shirt-length and barely that, showcasing endless legs crossed seductively. She’s beautiful, but it’s not her beauty I find distressing—it’s something else. Some indescribable quality I don’t possess—sexuality and confidence. In any movie, she’d be cast as the seductive bad girl, the one no man can resist, which is pretty much what Audrey has already told me about her. It’s basically what Caleb said too.
“I guess that’s Kate,” I whisper.
“Don’t try to convince yourself that it was some great love story between the two of them,” he says, still staring at the photo. “Kate tends to get exactly what she wants, and she wanted him. End of story. They had nothing in common.”
“They must have had something in common.”
“They had one thing in common,” he says, his voice gravelly, laced with anger, “and without that one thing, they wouldn’t have lasted an hour.”
I’m sure he thinks he’s reassured me, but in reality, he’s done the opposite. As I follow him back to the bar, I’m once again fighting the mounting sense that I just can’t match up to her.
“You ready?” Caleb asks.
I nod and say goodnight to his friends before we head outside together, his hand on my back the whole way as if Jeremy might be lurking around a corner.
“Ride home with me,” he says. “No point in trying to hide it all now anyway.”
He opens the door of his truck and I climb in, fighting the desire to burst into tears. He grabs my hand after he starts the engine, but his face is strained.
“Are you really okay?”
That concern in his eyes undoes me. I want this so much, want him so much, and it’s starting to feel like it’s never going to work out. He didn’t promise me the fairy tale and between his ex and mine and the fact that he’s still planning to move…it’s hard to see how we’ll wind up with one.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I can’t believe I got you in a fight tonight.”
“You didn’t get me in a fight. I wanted that fight. I wanted it more than I’ve ever wanted a fight in my entire life, and I still want it. Are you sure he didn’t hurt you?”
“I’m sure.”
He cradles my jaw in his hands and kisses me. When he starts to lean away, I grab his collar and pull him to me. His mouth on mine feels like relief, like a cure, but he backs away again, leaning his head against the seat. “Lucie, keep kissing me like that and I’m not gonna be able to stop.”
“I don’t want you to stop,” I tell him. The bar is only thirty feet away, but it’s too dark for anyone to see inside his truck. I climb over him. The steering wheel is at my back and my left knee is propped awkwardly on the center console and I couldn’t care less. I unzip his jeans, and he lifts his hips just enough for me to shove them and his boxers down. He reaches between my legs and stills.
“Thong?” he asks hoarsely.
“You can’t even see it, unfortunately.”
“Fuck,” he says, pulling it to the side as he thrusts into me. “The idea of it’s enough.”
I ride him hard and fast. I’m not sure what happened to the girl who always put herself last, because there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m doing this entirely for myself.
“Holy shit,” he groans. “What’s brought this on?”
I say nothing because I can’t tell him the truth: that it’s starting to feel like the odds are stacked against us. That they’ve always been stacked against us.
And that maybe we weren’t meant to wind up together after all.
32
CALEB
Lucie and I file our disclosure paperwork with HR on Saturday morning. Beck and I search her car for a tracker, and I have her phone wiped for the second time—though my tech guy finds nothing on it.
Harrison can’t ask for a restraining order because if he gets one, Jeremy has no reason not to press charges against me for throwing that punch.
It already feels like I’m failing her somehow, and then I get a call Monday morning that guarantees I’m going to fail her. It’s the call I’ve been waiting on for weeks—the meeting that will change everything. But it means I have to cancel our weekend away and I’ll be gone most of the weeks that would have led up to it.