My anguish is bone deep and soul crushing. Never mind they’re fully clothed instead of naked, writhing on each other. Never mind they’re on the couch instead of the bed. The way he’s holding her is more intimate than any sex act.
I turn and walk out as quietly as I came, leaving my beating heart on the floor at their feet, bloody and broken, eternal darkness taking up the empty space it left.
Chapter 39
Asher
“Hey, you can use the house tonight if you want. My plans changed.”
“What do you mean they changed?” Conn asks, skepticism in his voice. I’ve wanted that fucking house every year for the last five years and now that I have it, I’m giving it up. Yeah, he knows something’s up. I’m glad I’m having this conversation over the phone. It would be much harder to lie to his face.
“Just what I said. Something’s come up.”
I hear rustling in the background and a few seconds later, it sounds like his breathing’s picked up. Wow, starting early, huh? “Asher, what did you do?”
That pisses me off. “Oh, what? Because I would be the one to do something, right? Not her.”
“Well, yeah.”
“You don’t know shit.”
“And you’re probably jumping to conclusions, as usual. Jesus, Asher, do you have to sabotage every good thing you have?”
“I’m done with this conversation. Take the house if you want it. If not, fuck off.”
I no sooner hang up on him than I hear pounding on my door.
Asshole.
“What?” I growl, opening the door before I walk back to the couch, where I sit with a nice, strong, mostly vodka Bloody Mary. Who the piss cares if it’s only nine o’clock in the morning? Maybe this will help me pass the fuck out, because God knows I didn’t get even a wink last night as I lay wide-eyed in my bed wondering how this could have happened to me yet again.
This time, however, I will not recover. Pain lances every cell of my body this morning even worse than last night. I’m finding it hard to breathe. To think. To give a fuck about anything but numbing my heartbreak.
“Tell me what happened.”
“No.”
“I’m not leaving until you do.” He eyes my Bloody Mary and then snatches it from my hand before I have a chance to react.
“Prick,” I snip.
“Grow the fuck up. What happened?” Conn takes a seat in the loveseat across from me, resting an ankle on his opposite knee.
I stay silent, having no intention of divulging my stupidity over a woman once again to my twin. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, well…I don’t even know what to do with that. What I do know is there won’t be a third fucking time. I’m strictly a hit-it and quit-it guy from now on.
“Do you love her?” he asks.
“This isn’t about love.”
He nods. “I’ll take that as a yes. Where is she?”
“I don’t know. Probably still in the arms of that fucking photographer I caught her with a few hours ago.”
Conn’s unable to contain his reaction before masking it. “Cooper Jensen?”
“The one and only.”
“What were they doing?”
“Sleeping.”
“Naked?”
“No,” I reply, shaking my head. It was so much worse than that.
“There has to be an explanation,” he retorts. His optimism just pisses me the hell off sometimes.
“You always think there’s an explanation, Conn. I stood there quite a long fucking time staring at him holding my woman as they slept trying to figure out if my warped mind was playing tricks on me, but after about ten minutes it finally sank in that it wasn’t a goddamn hallucination and I left.”
“Without confronting them? Getting answers?”
“No, I didn’t confront them. They looked pretty fucking cozy. It’s simple, as it always is, brother. I was played. Again.”
He’s silent for a few minutes. Guess that shut him up.
“Did you ever cheat on Natalie?” he finally asks.
Or not.
“How are you turning this around on me?”
“Just answer the question. You ever cheat on her?”
“No.”
“She’s convinced you did. She says that’s the only reason she turned to this guy was because she thought you were sleeping with someone else and she wanted to hurt you like you’d hurt her.”
“I was one hundred percent faithful to her for the entire time we were together, even though she obviously didn’t deserve it. I never gave her any reason to think I was cheating. So I guess that’s on her then.”
“You’re missing the point.”
Sighing heavily, I play along even though that’s the last thing I want right now. I want to drink. I want to forget. I want to figure out how the hell I’m going to move one step ahead, let alone an entire lifetime without the woman who has herself buried so deep inside me I know I’ll never be free of her. “What is the point, Conn?”