Chapter 19

Paul:

“Whoa, who the fuck are you?” One of the women sitting at the table with Abby yells, pushing her chair back and looking like she’s about to jump over the table at me.

I ignore her and keep my attention trained on Abby and the guy sitting next to her, the one she was dancing all over while I was up on stage. Now she has the nerve to sit here next to him, acting completely innocent. I guess she must have forgotten that I had a perfect vantage of her down on the dance floor, a perfect view of her and him and the distinct lack of space between their two bodies because now she’s trying to pretend like she wasn’t just hanging all over him.

“Abby, you want me to kick this douche’s ass for you?” the dark-haired woman asks, and while she sounds completely sincere in her offer, I almost laugh. She’s barely five feet and looks like she couldn’t bench-press a sandwich, let alone beat up a six-foot tall, hundred eighty-pound man. I wouldn’t hit her back, obviously, but I also don’t think her punches would hurt much.

Abby shakes her head. “It’s okay Mags. This is what he does.” Then she turns to me and with enough venom to put down an elephant, she asks. “Isn’t it?”

I reel from the impact of her accusation. Me? I shake my head in surprise. “What I do? You’re the one who was grinding on some dude half an hour after having my dick in your hands.”

Abby gasps, and I’m pretty sure the petite blonde a few seats down from her does as well. I’m being crass, but I don’t care, don’t care that I’m shocking not just Abby but her friends too. I’m seeing red, and there’s no reining myself in. Not when I’m kicking myself for having fallen for her tricks again. I knew better. I’ve been down this road before.

And then the guy she was dancing with has the nerve to involve himself. “Listen, man. I think you’ve got the wrong idea here.” He raises his hands in a show of innocence. She must really have him wrapped around her finger if he’s trying to defend her instead of dumping her ass after hearing what she was doing with me backstage.

“I don’t think I do. Have you slept with him?” I ask Abby.

Abby’s eyes flash with fury. “And what if I have?” She practically shouts the question at me. “I don’t owe you an explanation.”

“That’s not an answer!” A long minute passes where we just stare at each other angrily. I’m so pissed off that I can’t think of anything to say. All I want is to go back and erase the last several weeks. I wish she’d never stepped foot into the security office, never come back into my life. I almost wish I’d never met her in the first place.

She gets up from the table slowly, like all the passion and vivacity that normally fuels her movements has suddenly evaporated, leaving her a shell of a person. I guess that’s what getting caught cheating does to a person. She grabs her coat and her purse and starts to walk away. She turns back after only a few steps and says, “I was never going to be good enough for you, was I? You will always think the worst of me.”

A tear rolls down her cheek, and it’s almost enough to take the wind out of my sails, almost enough to make me second guess my anger. But then I remember looking out over the dance floor and seeing her shimmying and talking into that guy’s ear in a way lovers do. Seeing them like that had brought back long banished memories of the night I walked in on her kissing some stranger at a party. She’d had the nerve to look innocent and surprised at being caught back then, too. Like she never expected me to find them. But I did. Just like I saw her rubbing her body on this guy tonight. I double down. “I just see you for the cheater you are.”

Abby’s expression crumbles before my eyes, but she turns away before any tears fall. She runs from the club, and it takes everything I have in me not to follow her, not to promise her the world and the freedom to have all other lovers she could ever want if she’ll just be with me. Because that’s what she does to me, makes me want to throw away my self-respect and give her every damn thing she could ever want if she’ll just stay with me forever.

Instead, I head to the bar and slam myself down on a stool. “Whiskey,” I bark when the bartender comes over to take my order.

~

I sulk—and drink—my way through the weekend, and I’m such a mess at band practice on Sunday, that Robby calls it a day just forty-five minutes into what’s supposed to be a three-hour jam session. “Come on, man. Let’s go get a drink,” he tells me after we’ve packed up our equipment. We leave the studio space that we rent for practices and head for Rob’s apartment, which is less than two blocks away.

When we get there, his cousin, Sam, is hanging out on the couch reading a book. She looks up when we enter and greets us with a friendly, “Hello,” before going back to her book. Robby motions for me to take a seat, and I opt for the bar stool at the kitchen counter rather than on the couch near Sam, mostly because I’m pretty sure she’s a friend of Abby’s. She was friendly enough when we came in, but I feel like things could turn dark any minute, if the way she keeps glaring at me over the top of her book is any indication.

Forty-five minutes later, we’re halfway through some military, shoot ‘em up, gratuitously violent movie that under normal circumstances I would have loved. But right now, I’m on my third drink and seriously rethinking all of my life choices when Rob gets up from the chair he’s been sitting in and says, “I gotta take a leak.” He pauses the movie and saunters out of the living room and down the hall.

“You’re an idiot,” Sam says the second the bathroom door shuts.

I set my bottle back on the bar and make to stand. I’m not going to stick around here just to be insulted by Abby’s friends. But Sam jumps up from the couch and makes it to me just as I get to my feet. She presses the fingertips of one hand against my chest. “You’re going to want to hear what I’ve got to say.”

“Do you know how long Abby and I have been friends?”

I shake my head and sit back down on the stool, even though what I really want to do is move Sam out of my way and head for the door, get the hell out of this apartment.

“Since freshman year.”

I feel my eyebrows hit my hairline. “So, you were friends when—”

Sam nods. “When you broke Abby’s heart the first time.”

I frown. “I was going to say, when she cheated on me.”

Sam paces away from me, shaking her head like she’s talking to an exasperated child. “Jeez, you really are an idiot of the first order, aren’t you?”

“Fuck you.” And that’s the beer talking. I’ve never been this rude to a woman in my life.

“Shit, Paul. Abby didn’t cheat on you.” Sam’s practically yelling at me now.

So, I shout back. “I was there! I saw her kissing that guy.”

“Dude, what the hell is going on? I leave the room for two minutes and come back to find you two about to kill each other.” Rob stands at the entrance to the hallway with his hands on his hips and his eyebrows scrunched in confusion.

Sam sighs dramatically and throws her hands in the air before returning to her seat on the couch. “I just might kill this idiot if he can’t get his shit together.”

“Stop calling me a fucking idiot!”

Sam rolls her eyes. “Well, then, stop being one.”

I try again to get up from my stool. To Rob, I say, “I’m going to head home. I don’t need this shit right now.” I slice a glare in Sam’s direction, but she’s glaring back at me like I’m the bad guy.

“Bro, just chill and hear her out.” Rob’s expression says he clearly knows something I don’t, and as much as I just want to get out of here right now, for some reason, I decide to stay. And listen.

“Fine. Say whatever it is you think is going to change my mind, and then I’m fucking out of here.” I cross my arms over my chest and wait.

And that’s when Sam drops an atomic bomb on me. “She was assaulted.”

It takes me a moment to register that Sam is talking about Abby, not because I’ve lost track of the thread of the conversation but because I can’t imagine Abby being assaulted. She’s so strong, so independent, with a heaping dose of kick ass. “When?” I ask. Not trusting my voice enough to say more.

Sam answers slowly, like it’s a simple concept and I’m just too obtuse to understand it. “The night you broke up with her. She wasn’t kissing some other guy, jack ass. That guy was forcing himself on her.”

Thunder roars inside my head, and it takes a moment for me to realize that’s the sound of the blood rushing in my ears. I feel like my entire foundation has just been cracked in two and I’m on the verge of plummeting into the depths of the crevasse left behind. Some prick has forced himself on my Abby. And instead of defending her, instead giving him the beating he deserved, I’d assumed the worst. I blamed her, thought she was cheating on me.

Even Rob looks stricken by this news. He drops down onto the couch heavily. “Shit.”

I mentally replay that night, trying to figure out how I could have missed something so obvious. I remember going to the party with her and feeling the entire night like she was being distant. I knew it was because I’d talked about marriage a few days before. She hadn’t reacted well to that conversation and had been a little standoffish ever since. I was feeling hurt, vulnerable, like I was on the verge of losing her and my perfect vision of our life together that I’d been picturing: marriage, house, two-point-five kids, and a dog. She’d gone to get something to drink but didn’t come back right away, so I went looking for her.

And found her down a dark hallway, pinned against a wall, with some guy’s tongue down her throat and his hand up her shirt. And I’d flipped my shit. I stormed out of there so fast, the front door had actually swung back and hit me in the ass on my way out. I didn’t ask questions, didn’t try to figure out what the hell was going on.

And now that I’m recalling the memory with a fresh perspective, I realize that while his hands hand been on her body, her hands had been on his upper chest, near his shoulders. It wasn’t the passionate embrace I’d taken it for. She very well could have been trying to push him off her.

But… “That doesn’t explain her dancing with that guy at the club the other night.”

Sam rolls her eyes again. She’s been doing that a lot since I got here. “That was RJ. He wasn’t trying to get with Abby. He was trying to get Abby to hook him up with Sarah.”

“Why didn’t she tell me that when I asked if they’d slept together?” I don’t know why I’m trying so hard to cling to my erroneous assumptions. Maybe I’m not quite willing to admit what I know, deep down inside, to be true.

Sam spears me with an intense look. “They used to sleep together, but that’s been over for a while now, and if you use that as any sort of justification for what you did the other night, I will personally kick you in the balls.”

Noted. “But they aren’t sleeping together now?” I run a hand through my hair, trying to piece everything together.

“No. I told you, he wanted Abby to hook him up with Sarah.” She’s talking to me like I’m an idiot again. “And you broke her heart over it. Again.”

Fuck. Sam is right. “I am an idiot.”

“No shit.”

I need to fix this, need to make this right. I need to make it all up to Abby. But I can’t do that alone. I turn to Sam. “I need your help.”