“Yes, but we didn’t do anything. I swear. I’ve been trying to get away from her long enough so I could see you and explain it but with school and practice, I couldn’t, and then you saw us and you saw wrong. You have to believe me.” He pauses a beat. “You believe me, right? Because I want to be with you. And you know that. But I can’t break up with her right now. I just can’t.”

“You need to leave.” I start closing the door on him, but he stops me, his palm loud when it smacks against the timber. “Lane, please.”

I finally look up at him, my tear-stained eyes meeting his sorry ones, and I’m sick of his sorry eyes. Sick of his sorry face.

I blink, let the tears fall, and I don’t wipe them away because I want him to see what he’s done to me. I clear my throat so my voice doesn’t falter. I want him to hear my words, and I want them to be loud. To be clear. “You need to leave because I don’t want you here. I don’t want you standing at my door, apologizing, trying to make me understand why I can’t be hurt by this because I am. I hurt. And I don’t want to hurt. I want to go back to last night when you made me feel beautiful, when you made me feel loved and worthy of that love. When I gave you something I’d been holding on to that I can’t take back, that I’d been saving… for you. And you can’t be here because having you here is making me forget that feeling, and I don’t want to forget. I want to pretend like that feeling lasted more than seventeen fucking hours, and I want to pretend like I don’t hate you for it. Or hate you, period.”

Chapter Ten

LUCAS

I try to be quiet, but I’m crashing into walls, into chairs, into Dad’s giant desk in his home office. I got home from Laney’s and went straight to the garage apartment and drank every single drop of alcohol I’d kept hidden from my dad. But it still doesn’t erase the image of Laney’s tear-stained face from my mind.

I had it all planned out. I’d tell her the truth, no sugar-coating, because she deserved that much. I didn’t say it to hurt her. I don’t want to hurt her. I fucking love her. In my head, she’d forgive me, tell me she understood that I didn’t have it in me to hurt someone I care about. And honestly, I did care about Grace. I just didn’t love her. I love Laney. Always have. If the roles were reversed and something happened to Brian, I’d have spent the night with Laney. I probably would’ve spent the night with her anyway. I just wouldn’t tell Grace about it. Grace doesn’t know I sleep in Laney’s bed. No one does. And maybe that’s where I fucked up. Where my mistakes turned me into an asshole because in a way, Laney was my secret, hidden away from the eyes of my friends so they couldn’t want her, have her. She was mine. My secret pleasure. She didn’t forgive me, obviously. She gave me her own truths, laid out her pain in detail so someone as stupid as me could understand. Then she slammed the door in my face and switched off the outside light, the light she always kept on for me. I should have expected it. But I didn’t. And I stood outside her door, in the dark, and I knew it was over.

She told me, warned me, if I didn’t show her I loved her, I’d ruin everything.

I fuck up, Lane. I make mistakes. I told you. I warned you, too.

“What the hell are you doing, son?”

I don’t bother turning to my dad, too out of my mind to care. I keep going through his keys, one after the other, trying to find the one that’ll unlock his liquor cabinet so I can keep drinking the pain away, so I can drown in it, just enough to get her words, her face, her hurt, out of my mind. “I hurt her,” I murmur, fumbling with the keys.

“Who?” he says, his voice louder as he steps toward me. “Grace?”

Fuck Grace. “Laney. She hates me, and I hate me, and I can’t get the hate out of me.”

Dad’s hand grasps my shoulder, pulls me back until I tip over and land on my ass. I want to cry, but I haven’t cried since Mom died and I sure as hell won’t show him, the strongest man I know, how weak I am.

He gently pries my fingers off his keys, finds the right one, and a moment later, he’s pulling out a bottle of whiskey and two glasses.

“Sit,” he says

“I am sitting.”

He sighs. “On the chair, son. Sit.”

“I’m fine,” I murmur, standing up, eyes on his office door because Dad and I don’t drink together. We don’t even talk. Not like this. We make plans, set schedules. We don’t talk.

“Sit,” he says, and this time it’s an order.

I take the seat on the other side of his desk, the one where his clients or his assistant sit when they have meetings in the office, and I’m nervous, afraid of what he’s going to say because he just caught his seventeen-year-old son trying to break into his liquor cabinet at two in the morning and he loves Laney. They all do.

He stays standing when he pours the brown liquid into both glasses, then slides one across the desk toward me. “Did you drive home like this?”

“No,” I tell him. “I’ve been drinking in the apartment.”

“Good. This family’s already experienced one death. We don’t need another.”

I say nothing.

“Lucas,” he says. “What happened?”

I finally look up at him, across the desk, past his sleep pants, beyond his white t-shirt, above his dark beard and into his worried eyes. I didn’t expect to see worry. Disappointment, anger, yes. But not worry. For seconds he stands there, eyes on mine and when I don’t speak, his shoulders drop and so does he, right into the chair opposite me. He sips on his whiskey, our eyes locked.

“Where did you go earlier?”

“To see Lane.”

“Where did you sleep last night?”

“At Grace’s.”

He nods, like he already knows where this is going.

I add, “After I went to see Lane.”

He puts down his glass, then places both elbows on the table and leans in, waiting for me to continue.

I swallow. Nervous. “I told her I loved her.”

“Grace?” he asks.

I shake my head.

His teeth show behind his smile, but it lasts only a second before his brow bunches and his lips purse. “But you spent the night with Grace?”

I inhale deeply, exhale slowly.

He’s shaking his head now, side to side, slowly, slowly. “What did you do, Luke?”

I tell him everything, everything, my knees bouncing the entire time because we don’t talk, and now we’re talking, and I’m giving him reasons to hate me like she does.

“Maybe she’ll forgive you,” he says, as if it’s that simple. “She always does.”

“This is different, Dad.” He knows it’s different. I can tell by the way he lifts his hand, pours another drink for himself and eyes my untouched one.

“She’s going through a lot right now, Luke. Her mother coming to see her—”

“You know about that?” I cut in.

He nods. “Brian told me today.” Another sip. “I told him we could arrange a loan if it meant getting Lane to UNC.”