Page 58 of The Best Bad Decision

“I don’t want to.” My entire body screams at me, knees buckling, and I press my palms harder into the solid edge of the kitchen counter. Great big neon lights flash above my head. LIAR, LIAR, LIAR.

Liar, liar, pants on fire.

I want to. Fuck, I want to give it all up for him, fly off to some remote island and spend the rest of my days worshipping at the altar of his perfect fucking cock, but I can’t do that anymore.

I had to grow up when Maisy was born, and now… now I have to think about her. I have to put her needs above everything, and she needs me. She needs him, too, but she needs me to be her stability. And I can’t be anyone’s stability while Cam is rocking my world the way he did in Singapore, the way he did on the phone two nights ago.

His face falls. His mouth opens and then closes again.

“Okay,” he whispers, finally. “I’ll call Maisy tomorrow.”

He ends the call, and my kitchen falls silent as I sink to the floor.

thirty-one

Cam

Fuck.

I throw my phone at the mattress so hard it bounces off the surface of the bed sheets and lands on the floor beside the bed. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

She doesn’t want me. She doesn’t want this. Us.

I thought I’d felt heartbreak before. I thought my heart had broken at sixteen when I saw Cathy Torres kissing Landon Jacobs after agreeing to be my date to Homecoming. I thought I’d felt it at twenty when I failed a checkride and convinced myself I’d never be a pilot.

I thought I felt it when Romany Gill told me she couldn’t handle me being away so much, and she ended our seven-month relationship three days after I told her I was in love with her.

But nothing—nothing—compares to the way this hurts in my chest, in my stomach, in every single bone of my body. Nothing has ever hurt this much.

I meant it when I told her there’d been no one else. That she’d ruined me that night in Singapore. Since then, all I’ve seen when I close my eyes is her. And now, I see the two of us. And Maisy,too.

At least, I did.

I thought she wanted me too. I’ve never known elation like the way I felt when she opened for me, showed me how turned on she was just at the idea that I wanted her. I’ve never felt such an uncontrollable rush. And when she fell apart for me, yelling my name, that was my undoing.

Maybe we undid too much.

Fuck, I’ve loved her for so long, I can’t even remember a time when I didn’t. Maybe it’s foolish to believe I fell in love at first sight, but something tugged in my chest the moment I saw her, even in profile. Something drew me in, had me enraptured and enchanted, ready to fall. And the more I learned about her, the more determined I was to give her everything.

Waking up alone hurt. I knew we’d had something very real, and the scent of her perfume lingered on my skin, seeping from my pores as I worked hard in the gym, berating myself more with each treadmill mile for not getting her number, or even her last name.

I’ve wanted her ever since. Not just in a biblical, primal sense, although it’s always been her name on my lips with my cock in my fist. But the way it felt to talk to her, to learn about her, to just be in her orbit—it’s a feeling I’ve missed for four years, and it’s something I finally got back in Santiago. And it’s something that grew immeasurably, exponentially with every passing day, every bedtime story, every nighttime chat. Every smile, every brush of our hands.

I let myself believe just for a moment that she wanted me too, and in showing her my cards, I gave her the key to total my heart and crash it right off a fucking cliff.

“How’d you do it, man? How’d you know?” My arm wavers as I hold the phone above my face, my other arm slung across my eyes. The eyes that burned from lying awake all night, tossing and turning and replaying every second of the last three months in my mind. The eyes that were heavy and bloodshot when I stared at my reflection in the mirror this morning.

“How’d I know what? Jake, stop running in the house. What’s going on, dude? You look like lukewarm shit.” Gray pauses mid-conversation to chastise his youngest son, before turning back to me.

“Lina. How did you know you were ready to settle down?”

“One look at those baby blues and I was fucked, man.” The motherfucker offers a cheesy, shit-eating grin, and I groan into my arm. Of course it was that fucking easy for him. “You think you’re finally ready?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like, I’ve never been there before…”

“Yeah, why is that?”

“You know,Gray,” I say pointedly.

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