I didn’t stop loving you. I never stopped loving you.
Farrah couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t process.
All she could do was tremble and cling to the edge of the cliff, trying to save herself from what was sure to be another fall. Except this time, she didn’t think she’d survive.
There were only so many times a girl could fall before something inside her irrevocably broke. The first fall split her in half, into before and after. Before Blake, after Blake.
She didn’t want to know what would happen a second time.
“You’re lying.” Farrah’s voice quavered—from hope or fear, she didn’t know.
Blake’s laugh was so bitter she could taste it in the back of her throat. He pushed himself off her and stepped back, and she mourned the loss of his warmth even as her senses crept back into her foggy brain.
“God, Farrah. We were together for months. I loved you, in every way I could, for months. But all it took was a few words for you to believe it had all been a lie.” The anguish in his eyes ripped her apart. For all the years and distance between them, for all the heartbreak that littered their past, his pain was hers. “How could you believe me? How could you have looked into my eyes and believed you were anything except my whole world?”
The tears fell again, a torrential downpour so strong she couldn’t see past it. Farrah didn’t bother wiping the tears away. “Because everyone leaves,” she bit out. “My dad left. You left. And I’m always the one left holding the pieces.”
She sank to the floor, her body shuddering with the force of her sobs. She wrapped her arms around her legs and buried her face against her knees, drowning beneath the waves of her grief. Farrah was damn good at bottling up her emotions, but that was the thing about bottles—there comes a point when they run out of their capacity to contain, and their contents gush forth, toppling everything and everyone in their path.
For Farrah, that point was now.
For years, she’d been wracked with guilt over her last words to her father before he died—I wish you were dead—but there was something else. A part of her, buried deep down inside, that resented him for not taking better care of himself after he and her mom divorced. For gambling with his health and passing his days as if he had nothing to live for when he had a daughter who needed him. Farrah couldn’t help but wonder if her words had driven him over the edge. She didn’t think he killed himself—his liver disease had developed over several years—but maybe her teenage viciousness had loosened his grip on what tied him to this world. Maybe, if she’d been a better daughter, he would’ve tried harder to stay.
Farrah squeezed her eyes shut and tried to calm her sobs. She hated crying in front of other people. She could count the number of times she’d done so on one hand, and four out of the five it had been because of the man next to her.
Blake slid onto the floor beside her and wrapped both arms around her, holding her close. The erratic thump of his heart and the shivers in his body matched hers. He was both her storm and her shelter from the hurricane.
“I’m here.” He stroked her back, and it felt so safe, so familiar, she cried harder because she couldn’t bear the thought of losing this haven. “I’m not leaving. I’m right here.”
Farrah raised her head and wiped her face with the back of her hand. She must look like a mess, all teary-eyed and red-nosed, but she didn’t care. “What happened with my necklace?”
Blake’s brows dipped.
“Sammy said to ask you about the night I lost my necklace. He said it’ll explain everything,” she hiccupped.
Blake swore softly. “Do you remember how you got your necklace back?”
“Sammy found it and returned it to me.”
“He didn’t find it. I did.”
Shock stuttered her breath. “How—”
Blake’s throat convulsed with a hard swallow. “I knew how much that necklace meant to you, so I searched for it while everyone was getting ready for the dance. I found it hidden in a pile of leaves off the main path. It must’ve fallen off and washed away in the rain. Sammy saw me on his way to get his phone from the auditorium. I gave it to him to give to you and told him to say he found it.”
There’d been a giant storm that night. The worst storm they’d seen during their year in Shanghai. The mental image of Blake rummaging through the bushes, searching for her necklace in the pouring rain, wrapped around Farrah’s chest like a vise and squeezed until she couldn’t breathe. “Why would you do that?”
Blake smiled a sad smile. “Like I said, I never stopped loving you. But I didn’t want you to know.”
Dammit. Farrah was going to run out of moisture in her body before the end of the night. She blinked back another onslaught of tears and asked the biggest question of all. “Why? If you still loved me, why did you break up with me?”
Blake’s eyes darkened with guilt. “Before I say anything, I want you to know—I’m not always a good person. I want to be. But I make mistakes.” He drew in a deep breath. “When I broke up with you, I told you I got back together with my ex-girlfriend over winter break and that I still loved her. That wasn’t true. Not really. We were both at a mutual friend’s party—Landon’s party, actually. Cleo and I grew up together. My parents always pushed me to date her, even though I never saw her as anything more than a friend. But I caved in college, and we dated for a year. I broke up with her right before I left for Shanghai. When I saw her again on New Year’s, I wanted to make things right. We’d been friends for a long time, and I hated the way we ended things. She agreed to be just friends, even though I could tell she still had feelings for me. We drank the night away and…” His voice trailed off. “Well, we got hammered.”
Acid sloshed in Farrah’s stomach. She had a feeling she knew where this was going.
“The next morning, I woke up in one of Landon’s family’s hotel suites. I had no recollection of the previous night, save for a few random flashes here and there. I rarely black out from alcohol, but I went in with an empty stomach and I drank a lot. At first, I thought, no big deal. I was hungover as shit, but it’s nothing I haven’t experienced before. But then Cleo came out of the shower and…” Another hard swallow. “She said we slept together.”
Blake watched her closely, like he expected Farrah to bolt any second.
She should. She’d known he’d cheated on her that winter break—he said so himself—but it was excruciating to hear the play-by-play of how it happened, even if he hadn’t meant to do it.
Nevertheless, something glued Farrah in place.
“Go on,” she said dully.
“I came back to Shanghai, and I felt so fucking guilty for cheating on you and lying to you. I wanted to tell you the truth, but I loved you so much, and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you.” Blake’s voice cracked. “I know it’s not an excuse, but I honestly don’t remember that night. I have no idea what happened, or how I ended up sleeping with Cleo. I just know the secret killed me inside. That was why I acted so weird the first few weeks after we came back. I’m not proud of it, but I thought I could hide it from you. Then Cleo called me and…” Blake’s jaw clenched.
Farrah’s pulse drummed in warning. “And?”
“She told me she was pregnant. With my baby.”
The acid in her stomach turned to ice. Farrah’s breath rose and fell in rapid gasps as she tried to process the information. Blake got his ex-girlfriend pregnant while he and Farrah had been dating and he never told her.
She scrambled to her feet, needing to do something, anything, to release the rage and restless energy coursing through her. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth instead of feeding me bullshit about still being in love with your ex?”
Pain carved itself into Blake’s face. “Because I didn’t want you to know how badly I’d fucked up. Because I wanted you to have a clean break. My life was a mess, Farrah. I was about to graduate with no career prospects except a wild dream about owning a bar, and I was going to have a baby with a woman I didn’t love. I didn’t want to drag you into the shitshow. I was young and stupid and thought I was doing the right thing. You probably would’ve broken up with me anyway, but with your heart and compassion, I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t try to save me. And I didn’t deserve to be saved.”
Farrah pressed her fists against the counter and closed her eyes, trying to imagine what her twenty-year-old self would have done. She hated cheaters. If Blake had told her the truth back then, she might very well have drop-kicked him in the balls and ran. But she also knew reason took a backseat when it came to all things Blake Ryan. She’d been in love with him enough that she wouldn’t have been able to walk away as easily as she had had she known he’d still harbored feelings for her.
“Where’s the baby?” she asked.
Since they reunited, Blake hadn’t said a single word about being a father. No pictures of children, no nothing.
Unease edged into her consciousness.
“We lost the baby.” Blake’s voice flatlined. “Cleo had a late-term miscarriage.”
Farrah snapped her head up and around. Blake was still sitting on the floor, his features tight with guilt and heartbreak.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. This time, Farrah was the one who sank next to him and wrapped her arm around his shoulder.
It looked messed up from the outside, her comforting her ex over the loss of the baby he’d had with the woman he’d cheated on her with. But humans were humans, and Farrah wouldn’t wish the pain of losing a child on her worst enemy.
“We couldn’t make it work after that.” Blake’s muscles bunched beneath her touch. “We’d only gotten together again for the baby anyway, and it hurt too much to look at each other and remember what we lost. She moved to Atlanta, and I threw myself into my business. I never looked back. Except some nights when I…” His voice trailed off. “Anyway, that’s the truth. One mistake I don’t remember that fucked up everyone I cared about, including you.” Blake’s head bowed. “If you want to leave, I don’t blame you.”
The secrets they’d laid bare soaked into the walls, the floor, and Farrah’s very bones. There’d been so much information thrown at her in the past hour she’d need a high-powered supercomputer to sort through it all.
“Kiss me.”
Blake’s head jerked up. Shock scrawled all over his face. “What?”
Instead of repeating herself, Farrah grabbed his face and pressed her lips to his. Blake’s confession shocked her and pissed her off, and yes, she should hate him for keeping something as big as a freakin’ pregnancy from her. But she also felt his pain, and of all the emotions she’d had toward him over the years, hate had never been one of them.
It was impossible to hate someone who’d burrowed themselves so deep in your psyche they were a part of you.
“Is this really what you want?” Blake’s voice rasped down her spine.
Farrah nodded. Her brain was short-circuiting from the events of the night, and she couldn’t think properly.
Good.
She didn’t want to think. She didn’t want to feel. She wanted to forget.
She could deal with the ramifications of tonight tomorrow, but for now, she needed what only Blake could give her.
Oblivion.
Blake and Farrah stumbled into his bedroom without breaking their kiss. Their clothes tumbled to the floor, their hands roamed, and their mouths explored, hungry and desperate to escape the demons of their past.
This wasn’t about love or lust; this was about losing themselves in a place where nothing bad could touch them, if only for a while.
Blake slammed into her, and a cry fell from her mouth. Sensation sizzled through her, burning all the decisions she had to make and memories she wanted to leave behind until there was nothing left but ashes.
“Promise me one thing,” Blake said. “Promise you’ll be here in the morning.”
Farrah dragged his mouth back to hers and clenched around him until he groaned and resumed his thrusts.
She didn’t reply to Blake’s request.
Farrah didn’t like making promises she couldn’t keep.
