Page 70 of Holly Ever After

“You jumping into bed with just anyone now, Holly?”

I swear my heart splits in two.

“Hey,” Sean roars, his eyes murderous. “Watch your fucking mouth.”

This is everything I feared.

“Stop,” I plead. “Mark, we're both adults here. We made a choice—”

“A damn stupid choice.” He cuts me off, but his eyes are still locked on Sean.

“Look, I get that you're pissed, and you have every right to be,” Sean says, finally pulling on a shirt. “But this isn't just something that happened. There's more here, and we need to talk about it—”

“Talk about it?” Mark scoffs, throwing his hands up. “Oh, we’re going to talk.”

He turns to me, his anger morphing into disappointment. “You're just another notch on his bedpost, Holl. You know that, right?”

My heart splinters into pieces because a part of me already knew that, but it's Sean's lack of response that confirms it.

What did I expect? I knew what this was. But there's still a part of that naive little girl that had a crush on Sean as a teenager that still lives somewhere in me, that ignited that flame in my belly.

I was too blinded while we were cocooned here in our own bubble that I forgot that there was an entirely different world outside of it.

It's my turn to look at Sean, but the heat I've grown accustomed to over the last week is nothing but ice now and it's cold to my skin.

Say something.

I wait, but nothing comes.

I feel another crack in my chest.

Mark doesn't wait for a response. He gives Sean one final glare before turning on his heels and storming out of the bedroom. The heavy thud of the front door closing echoes through the house, reverberating in the awkward silence he leaves in his wake.

Sean finally looks at me, but his eyes are unreadable, a guarded wall I can't penetrate. The tension in the room is stifling, suffocating, as if the air itself is holding its breath, waiting for someone to speak. I suddenly feel bare, and not just because of my state of undress.

“Sean,” I begin, my voice wobbling despite my best effort to keep it steady, “Say something. Anything.”

He opens his mouth, hesitates, and then closes it again. The weight of Mark's accusation hangs between us, a physical entity that neither of us can ignore.

Finally, he speaks, but his voice is low, almost a whisper. “I never meant for any of this to happen. Not like this.”

“Is that all you've got? You never meant for it to happen? That's your grand explanation?”

“I don't know what you want me to say,” he confesses, looking lost for the first time since I've known him. “I never intended to put you in a position where you'd be caught in the middle of whatever this is.”

“And what isthis? Because if I'm just another notch on your bedpost, like Mark said, then you better tell me now.”

“I don't know,” he admits, his face etched with a mixture of regret and indecision. “I honestly don't know. Last night, this morning—they felt different, but now...I just don't know.”

The raw honesty in his voice does little to comfort me. Instead, it deepens the ache in my chest, the searing pain of reality cutting through the warmth that had enveloped us just hours earlier.

“You don't know,” I repeat, tasting the bitterness of each word.

“For fuck’s sake, Holly,” he says, getting to his feet. “What did you think this was? What do you want?”

What do I want?

I don’t know because I haven’t had time to think about anything beyond being snowed in with him in this cottage.

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