Page 33 of Keeping Mr. Sweet

“Come on.” Summer puts her arm through mine, pulling me away from our posse of boys. “We should talk while the men hunt for pizza.”

***

“I can’t believe that some…some… wanker would do that to you. And there’s nothing you can do?” Summer is ready to jump out of her skin. The pale gold wine in her glass swings perilously close to the rim as she picks jerkily at some imagined lint on her fuzzy cardigan. “You can’t get him fired? Or… anything? You’ve reported it to the police though, right? Surely you could sue him.”

She hasn’t been able to sit still since we started talking through what happened. She keeps clenching her teeth and sounding pained each time she asks for a little more detail. “Is it some kind of revenge thing? I just don’t understand how someone could do this to anyone.”

“I don’t know either,” I tell her, examining my fingernails and trying to pretend it’s not a big deal so Summer doesn’t get any more wound up. I’m supposed to be turning over this new leaf where I tell her everything, and I do want to, but if I told her about the demands in the texts Luca’s been sending then she’d tell Sam. I put the lid back on her nail polish and spread my cherry tipped fingers across my thigh, so they can finish drying. I need to work out how to fix this myself without Sam getting involved. We’ve come so far, I don’t want to let him down now. I don’t want to see the disappointment he’ll feel when he realizes how badly I’ve screwed up. Especially when I can’t imagine leaving him again. “We only dated for a little while. There was nothing to get revengy about. I don’t understand why he did it at all. He’s just a sick individual. They both are.”

“At least you weren’t in love with him,” she says, like I could ever have feelings for anyone like Luca. “You’ve always been so emotionally resilient.”

I roll my gaze at her, mainly so my eyes don’t get glassy. She’s my best friend and she truly has no idea how wrong she is about me. “Hard to feel anything for a guy like that. Hard to love anyone after you’ve already found where you belong.”

“Who?” Eyes wide, she gapes at me, before her brain starts clicking along. I can see it; the great quantity of memories she must be sifting through while she dies of curiosity.

“It doesn’t matter.” I blow on my nails. “Not really, though I suppose you’ll find out at some point.” Would Sam be happy if I told her about us? Would it be enough for him to let down his guard? Would he let me slide on the other thing he made me promise to tell Summer about? Would he let Talon stay in the past where he belongs?

Sam thought I was in love with the guy. I never bothered to dissuade him from that notion. Never tried to explain that I’d been head over heels for Sam since I was fifteen, or that I’d had a life long crush on him before that, or that there was never anyone else, though I tried. I pretended. I faked like a damn champion. I held my secrets close to my chest and I let Sam believe that I grieved for a man I’d loved.

“Are you going to tell me?” Summer pushes at my arm, bringing me back to our conversation. “You can’t just leave me hanging like that. I’m your best friend.”

I wish I could tell her about Sam. Maybe she’d forgive me for keeping that secret. “Do you remember Talon Whyte?”

“Talon Whyte?” She leans her chin on the heel of her palm and drums her fingers on her lips.

“We went to school with him.”

“The son of that actor? He went to prison for assault if I remember—”

“We dated,” I blurt. “In college. For a semester.”

“And you fell in love with him?” Her eyes are bugging out of her head, the sudden jolt forward at the news causes her wine to spill on her knee. “All this time and you never told me about him.”

“I’m telling you now,” I say, not even entirely sure why, except that Sam told me I had to. What difference does pulling the past out of the dark and parading it in front of Summer make anyway? It’s done. I can’t change it. She’ll only be disgusted with me. How am I supposed to live with that?

“We were involved for a while. I don’t know. We got each other in a lot of ways. His dad was gone and so was mine. His stepmother was almost the same age as us. Plus we both liked to party.” I glance at my feet because I can’t look her in the eyes. Calling Sam that night and telling him why I’d been arrested killed me. Telling Summer is worse, and I can barely force the words, “We got wasted a lot. High—”

“You were doing drugs?” She gasps, her hand going to her mouth.

On some level she must have known. It must have occurred to her. I was daddy’s little rich girl. No one gave a damn, but they sure did give me cash. I had disposable income to burn through and no one to make sure I used my head. When I went away to college, I didn’t even have her to keep my stupidity to a minimum. I pick at a fuzzy string on my sock until it becomes a hole. “We were having fun. We rarely showed up to class. We were usually hammered by lunchtime. I moved in with him when I was kicked off campus.”

“Ash, you never said a word. All those times I called…”

“I was strung out,” I whisper, wanting to vomit.

“I thought…” she shakes her head. “You sounded like you were having fun. I thought you were just being the same old Ash. How did I not know?”

“I’m really good at faking,” I say, pretending to be perky and blasé like she’s used to. All those times she called me she thought Molly was a girl in my dorm. She didn’t realize I was talking about my drug abuse. “Really good at pretending to be something other than what I am. Like happy.”

“Oh God, Ash. Did anyone know?”

“Sam knows,” I tell her. And their dad. Sam must have talked to him about it at some point, or at least he was aware that something had happened to drive me into his son’s home for all that time. “My brother knew?” She glances past me in the direction of the kitchen where our men are discussing who knows what while giving us some privacy to catch up.

“I needed him to bail me out,” I confess. “We stole this car, this beat up, rusted out old orange Ford with creaky doors. Talon thought we should take it for a spin. That it would be funny to cruise around in this beat up junk car like we were normal people. I don’t know why I agreed.”

“You stole a car?”

“I…I drove the car.” My stomach is in my throat, chunks and bile keep me from being able to swallow. “I honestly don’t remember how we went from thinking about stealing it to me driving it, but I was behind the wheel when we crashed. Talon wasn’t wearing a seat belt. His head was in my lap.”

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