Page 90 of Leah

She took a seat on the toilet and snatched the magazine. She gave it another look over before tossing it out the bathroom door. I felt a little panicked. Staring at it seemed to viciously add to my need to torment myself, and without it, I didn’t have a logical excuse to keep at it.

“So, you have a sex tape,” Melanie went on with a shrug. “Who cares? So do half the celebrities out there.”

I stared at her emptily. “I’m not a celebrity, which makes this worse. I don’t hide out in my mansion with my crew of other rich famous friends. I’m in normal-people-ville, and I have a target on the back of my head. Everyone in this town will have heard of me by now. I’ve had to unplug the damn phone so it’d stop ringing, and worst of all, I can’t even face Marlena and Harold about this crap because of how freaking awkward it’ll be.”

She stared at me sympathetically. “It’ll blow over, Leah.”

“Not anytime soon.”

She was silent for a moment. Then, “Can I ask you something?”

I shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

“Why didn’t you take Carter back? I mean, if he’s the one telling you for once that he wants more, how can you turn the other cheek?”

I sighed. “Because I’m scared. I don’t want to love and feel pain again.”

She pursed her lips in thought. “But that’s what love is, right? It’s painful and beautiful.”

“Then why aren’t you with Rome? He broke up with his fluff Alicia.”

“Alyssa,” she corrected with a look of disgust.

“Whatever.”

“I’m not with Rome because he’s a materialistic asshole now,” she explained simply.

“Is that right?”

“Yep.”

“Liar.”

She rolled her eyes. “This isn’t about me, anyway. It’s about you shoving your soulmate out of your life after he’s done something you’d been longing for him to do since you were ten years old.”

“He’s too late.”

“Yet you slept with him.”

I exhaled miserably. “Yeah, I slept with him.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to feel that connection again.”

“So, then, you led him on.”

My eyes narrowed at her. “I led him on? I definitely didn’t feel like that.”

“This is what he did to you for a long time, right? The whole friends-with-benefits thing. He wanted to have a piece of you, but he was too scared to have all of you. So then you’d have this amazing sex where you felt so close to each other, and then, when the world came back on, he didn’t want anything more than friendship.”

“Get to the point.”

With a sad smile, she said, “You’ve turned into him.”

Ouch.

“Shots fired, Mel,” I whispered.

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