No. Anything but that. Shit, two weeks. Two weeks and she had already moved on? He was in her rear-view mirror. Forgotten. A fucking bad memory?
Shit, he couldn’t breathe properly. Was he hyperventilating? His vision was getting fuzzy.
“Jesus. Adam? Are you okay?” Joe said. At least he thought it was Joe.
Was he okay? The woman he loved beyond reason was with someone else two weeks after he ended things between them. No. No, he was not fucking okay. He was dying.
Adam shoved Joe’s hand off his shoulder and tried to walk away.
Joe grabbed his shirt and shoved him back against the workbench. “You really care about her, don’t you?”
“What gave it away?” he choked.
Both Hugh and Joe were studying him like they’d never seen him before. “Why’d you end it with Lucy when you so obviously love her?” Joe asked.
“You know why,” Adam gritted out. “You saying you want me with your sister now?” Jesus. His head was spinning.
“Fuck no,” Hugh said.
“That’s what I thought.”
“I’ll never settle down. I don’t want commitment and all the shit that goes with it,” Hugh rumbled, throwing his own words back at him. “Sound familiar? You’ve been saying that shit since I met you in high school. You’ve never had a girlfriend, and you’ve spent the last twenty years trying to fuck your way through the female population.” Hugh crossed his arms. “Would you want you to date your sister?”
Adam had said all those things, many times. He’d believed them, too, down to his bones, but now…
“I didn’t think that’d changed until the reaction you just gave us,” Joe said. “What are you going to do about it?”
Adam shook his head. “Nothing,” he rasped. This might be her chance at true happiness. Fuck. The One. He thought he might throw up.
Hugh made a disgusted sound. “You don’t think you deserve her?”
Adam held his friend’s hard stare. “You telling me I’m wrong?”
“The right man for Lucy is the kind of man that’ll fight for her. So yeah, you’re right, you’re sure as fuck not that man.” Hugh strode away.
Fuck.
Joe stood there staring at him. Finally, he said, “At first, I was pissed at you for soiling my precious baby sister, for sneaking around behind our backs. Then I was pissed at you for doing exactly what I thought you’d do, breaking her heart and letting her go. Now I’m not pissed, I’m fucking furious. The way you reacted, you don’t just care, you love her, but you sacked out anyway. That’s pretty fucking pathetic, dude.”
Before Adam could answer, Joe was striding away. Adam was trying to process what the hell had happened, what it all meant, if it meant anything, when Joe stopped and turned back to him.
“And by the way, about the new guy Lucy’s seeing? I lied. She’s not seeing anyone. She’s going back to school.” Joe winked. “Just wanted to see how you’d react. You didn’t disappoint—no, scratch that—you totally fucking did.” Then he walked out the door.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Adam sat in his car and stared down at his phone. He wanted to call her so damn badly. To congratulate her about school, tell her how proud of her he was for sticking with her dream of becoming a child psychologist.
To beg her not to leave.
“Shit.” He shoved his phone back in his pocket and stared out the windscreen to the cemetery beyond. The sun was starting to dip in the sky, casting long shadows from the headstones. It was a beautiful cemetery. Well maintained, lined with trees, their leaves rustling softly in the breeze. His mom had already paid for the plot, he’d found out after her death. How long had she been planning it? How long had she had it before she did what she had?
After grabbing the flowers off the seat beside him, he got out of the car. It was still hot enough that sweat instantly rose on his skin, sliding down between his shoulder blades. It was the same every year. For some reason, he noticed all these things, and like every year, it took gargantuan effort to make his feet move him forward, to walk through the arched wrought-iron entrance. There was no one else around this late, which was why he always came at this time of day. He didn’t need an audience, a witness to his pain. His hollow apology. An apology that could never make any of this better, that only brought his failure more clarity. As much as it hurt like fuck, he needed this, to be reminded of the reasons he needed to stay the hell away from Lucy.
He stopped in front of his mother’s simple headstone, staring down at her name and the dates of when her life began and ended. Forty-two years. That’s all she had. Would she still be there if it weren’t for his eagerness to escape, to escape her pain, the way seeing her suffer made him feel?