“I know, right? What the fuck was I thinking?” Cam said, shaking his head. “Anna talked me into it. I think she wanted to meet Bre. You know women, they’re always trying scout the competition.”
“You weren’t thinking. That seems like a theme with you lately.” Jax propped his feet on the coffee table.
Both men sat silently on the couch, not talking.
After a few minutes, Cam turned his head in Jax’s direction. “Alec said Bre left early. He said she didn’t feel good or something. Do you know if anything happened? Did Anna… say anything to her?” Cam looked out the window while tugging on the cuff of his shirt. “I don’t want to walk into my house only to get blindsided by some accusations.”
“Yes, Bre left early. Anna wasn’t very friendly, but she didn’t say anything to make Bre suspicious, or at least Bre didn’t share anything with me. Have you talked to Bre?”
“No, I haven’t heard from her. I’m not looking forward to going home. This weekend hasn’t turned out so well.”
“If you spent more than five minutes with her, it would help.”
“I know. Anna keeps sucking my time.” Cam rubbed his temples. “It’s as though she purposely tries to draw my attention away from Bre. I don’t know why I let her do it. She creates such a whirlwind of drama around her, it’s hard to keep everything in perspective.”
Jax pressed the palms of his hands into his eyes and then dropped his hands on his thighs. “You need to choose. You can’t keep playing this game with both of them.”
“Anna isn’t pushing me to get rid of Bre. She understands that Bre will always be part of my life. And Bre, well, she’s doesn’t live here, so it’s not a big deal.”
“And what about Bre, does she get a choice?” Jax asked, his voiced raised.
“Her choice is being with me. It wouldn’t matter to her whether or not she knew about Anna; she wouldn’t leave me. Bre and I are each other’s forever.”
Jax started laughing, but rather than sounding amused, he sounded distinctly bitter. “That’s comical. If you believe what you’re saying, she’s your forever girl, you have a fucked up way of showing her how much she means to you.”
“What do you mean?” Cam asked, shoving Jax’s shoulder lightheartedly.
Jax stood up from the sofa and walked to the front door of his loft, opening it, hoping that Cam would get the point that he wanted him to leave. He couldn’t stand being around Cam. Cam had Bre, and he didn’t even have enough sense to appreciate her. He knew there was a saying about the best man winning, but he knew that Cam wasn’t that man. He would never be that man for Bre, and yet she would probably be his in the end.
“For starters, why are you here looking for Anna instead at home with Bre?”
“Anna, well, you know Anna. She can be a little self-destructive. She needs me.”
Jax threw his hands up into the air. “And Bre doesn’t?” Jax paused, shaking his head. “Don’t answer that. I don’t care. I’m not involved anymore. This conversation is hurting my head. I’m going to bed.”
***
When Bre let herself into Cam’s apartment, it was dark and empty, just like her heart, she thought sullenly. After Jax had left her in the conference room, she swore her heart shattered into a thousand pieces. Every cell in her body begged her to run after him and promise him anything to let her come with him, but she was too scared to follow her heart, particularly when she didn’t know where her heart wanted her to go.
She could blame her problems on her mother, but if she were honest with herself, she was probably long past the age where she could continue to fault her mother for all of her deficiencies.
She had watched her mother flutter from one man to the next, always claiming to be more in love than ever before and telling Bre that this man was the one, her soul mate. Her mother had used the phrase so often to describe so many different men and different relationships that the phrase alone forced bile into her mouth. Her mother claimed that her creative nature made her restless, unable to commit for a long time, but Bre knew better. Her mother used her artistic nature as a license to be self-absorbed and impulsive.
Her mother’s reckless search for love left so many broken hearts and lives in her wake that Bre swore she would never be like her. She wanted to be realistic, loyal, and stand by the people she cared about through anything, and that meant Cam, because for as long as she could remember, Cam was the center of her life, first as her childhood friend and then as her boyfriend. Ironically instead of being Cam’s loyal girlfriend, she found herself wrapped up in twisted love triangle that was so reminiscent of her mother’s behavior that she struggled to swallow due to the unfamiliar constriction in her throat.