He hadn’t heard most of what they’d been talking about, but he heard his name in the same sentence as “Vegas”, and that was enough to send him off the deep end. The single night that had replayed in his mind over and over again for a couple years. Now it was relegated to a past mistake, something he’d always remember and regret, but not something that haunted him as it once had.
He didn’t want his new and old lives to collide. He didn’t want Abigail or Josh to think differently of him. He’d been a cowardly kid.
“Will you please tell me what I just walked into here?” he asked.
Abigail took a deep breath and looked to Taylor who was watching with curiosity. She didn’t know what her friend was going to say either.
“Okay,” Abigail said finally, straightening her shoulders as her show of strength. “Here goes. Just promise to listen to everything before you react.”
“I promise.”
She nodded once and sucked in a breath. “It started last year when I first started dating Colin. He knew about me and you, but to say he was less than pleased is an understatement. But things were sort of okay with us. Then the ball happened. By that point, he’d already told me he loved me. The truth was, I don’t think he loved me the way you’re supposed to. There was an obsessiveness about it that made me uncomfortable. I was going to break up with him after that night.”
“But you didn’t,” Mack interrupted.
Abigail acted as if she hadn’t heard him. “That’s when he made those accusations about you. Taylor told me what something like that could do to a career, and that you were already having problems with management.” She closed her eyes and took a second before admitting the next part. “We made a deal.” Opening her eyes, she found Grant to be staring at her.
“You made a deal,” he repeated dumbly.
“You didn’t!” Taylor gasped, putting the pieces together quicker than the rest of them.
“Colin suddenly withdrew his accusations of drug use.” Josh started to get it.
“What am I missing here?” Grant asked, looking around at their incredulous faces.
“She did it for you, you ass.” Taylor got up and slapped him on the back of the head.
Confusion morphed into guilt on Grant’s face as understanding dawned. “Abigail, I need you to say it.”
She huffed out a breath. “I promised to stay with him and away from you if he let you be.”
Grant dropped his face into his hands. “Why would you do that?” he muttered.
Abigail just shrugged. “Don’t be too grateful, I basically told him to suck it today.” She got to her feet and stepped around him to start pacing. “I have to be free of him, Grant. When I first agreed to this, I thought I could still be happy with him.” She stopped moving and looked down. “He’s not a good guy. A good person would sacrifice for someone else, but I have sacrificed enough in my life for other people.”
Grant got to his feet to meet her gaze. “I didn’t ask you to do this. I never would. My mistakes are my own, you can’t take them away from me.”
“He has something else on you. Something about Vegas.”
He sat on the couch, scratching the back of his hand against the stubble on his chin. Abigail stayed standing, her stare burning into him.
He should have been surprised, but he knew exactly how Colin found out, and he couldn’t even be mad because he deserved worse.
Maybe he was still that scared young man. Maybe the only way to break free of him was to tell the truth.
He felt like he was letting Josh down with the truth. His friend who thought drinking and women were his only demons. He couldn’t even look at him.
Abigail is about to regret helping me, he thought. She’d want nothing else to do with him. Not when she knew what he was; who he was.
Steeling himself against an onslaught of judgment and disapproval, he started talking.
“I was nineteen. I’d just played a full year in the NHL as an eighteen-year-old and was flush with cash for the first time in my life. I didn’t take anything seriously. So, I went to Vegas with a bunch of guys from back home. We were having a great time. We had top notch IDs that cost me a fortune, but allowed us to drink and gamble. The real party was in our penthouse, though. There were …” He looked over at Abigail and sighed before continuing. “Women. Prostitutes, I mean. And booze. And …” This time his eyes found Josh. “Cocaine. Lots of it.”
“We were just up there having the time of our lives and my buddy Travis falls over. We think he’s okay at first, but then he doesn’t get up. I run over to him, but I’m a little out of my mind at this point. He’s got stuff coming out of his mouth. I don’t even remember it all. We call 911 and everyone starts to split. My boy Derek tells me to get going too. The suite is in his name, so he’s going to be busted. But he tells me I don’t need to. So I leave them there.”