Sweet Cheeks(96)

Fucking. Me.

And the stories, the headlines, just kept getting more creative, more slanderous from there. Painting me as a horrible person for breaking up the couple who the public had unceremoniously crowned Hollywood’s It Couple.

Sitting in the airport I felt so incredibly alone and vulnerable. I would have given anything to call my mom and hear her soothing voice tell me everything would be all right in the end. To have her order me to throw the tabloids into the trashcan I was sitting beside and reassure me that no one in the airport was staring at me. To wrap her arms around me, murmur that everything happens for a reason, and that sometimes it takes time to know what that reason might be. And then to have Dad take the phone from her and tell me one of his god-awful Dad jokes to cheer me up. Remind me that all men are idiots and that’s why God created women.

God, I missed them.

Instead I called Ryder. I listened to him fume over what they were printing when all I wanted to do was cover my ears and shut the noise out.

But nothing—not the tabloids, not feeling like I disappointed Ryder, not my fear of losing Sweet Cheeks because customers will boycott the store—compared to the look on Hayes’s face when he walked me out to the waiting car to take me to the airport. Naturally, it was in the service bay due to the many photographers at the resort’s entrance.

Not the images they printed of the clandestine lovers or the horrible, vile lies they printed without truth could compare to the wrenching of my heart when we shared the last bittersweet kiss. The kiss where my tears were constant and nothing could abate the empty feeling of saying goodbye.

I can still hear Hayes’s whispered promise that he’d make this right. How he told me I was making a mistake walking away from him instead of weathering through it together. How I should just go to New York with him for a few days, do an interview together to show people what is really between us.

But I chose to walk away even though my chest hurts with every breath I take. I already miss him so much.

But missing him does nothing to ease how completely shaken I am by all of this.

I flew to the island a harmless ex-high school flame and, within a four-day span, fly home an adulterous whore hated by what feels like the whole world.

So I need this distance. Need my own bed. My own space. My own thoughts. Thoughts filled of him no less, but still my own. Without him crowding me and telling me you get used to the lies and the attention over the lies and you learn to not let them affect you. Because I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want to hear and see lies and be so cold to the world that I have to shut them out to live my day-to-day.

I know it’s not Hayes’s fault and yet I still need some distance so I don’t lash out at him. Because knowing it’s not his fault doesn’t fix the humiliation over the horrendous things being printed and posted and tweeted and Snapchatted about me. It doesn’t stop the cruel responses about how ugly I am compared to the flawless Jenna Dixon. It doesn’t shut out the comments about how in the hell can Hayes Whitley ever pick me, a very ordinary baker, over the glamorous starlet. How I must be pregnant because that’s the only justification as to why he’d stay with me when he could have her.

And it definitely doesn’t ease the fear niggling in the back of my mind that keeps creeping in at random intervals. If image is everything in Hollywood, if studios have the pull to make actors appear to be with or not with other actors for precious images’ sake, if the masses never accept me as Hayes’s girlfriend because I’ve been branded as a homewrecker, then how will our relationship last?

Relationships are hard enough as it is. New ones especially. And to have all of this outside pressure on us from the get-go? To constantly worry about anything I do or say and how it will be misconstrued and posted in the press makes me panic. I don’t want to be a liability for Hayes.

I don’t want that added stress in my life.

Pressure can cause even the strongest person to crack, so I know it can break relationships too.

Let him be the judge of that, Saylor.

I know it’s not fair to think all this without talking to Hayes about it, getting his input, and yet I can’t bear to talk to him just yet. Reading his continuous texts is hard enough. I miss him. I love him. I just need to know I can walk into this relationship with open eyes and enough strength that when the shit hits the fan, I’m secure enough to be the person Hayes needs me to be in his crazy world.

I squeeze my eyes shut and pinch my nose as the taxicab exits the freeway. I’m overthinking all of this. In fact, it’s all I’ve thought about between the bouts of tears and the constant doubt when all I want is the strength to believe in us.