Page 3 of Bite Marks & Broken Hearts

Tom

If you’re not going to answer my calls, at least reply to my messages. Or your sister’s. This isn’t fucking funny. Everyone is so worried.

And there went my heart, free-falling back down into oblivion, painfully squeezing itself for good measure. Katie’s messages were the hardest to ignore—each one a reminder of how I’d abandoned the sister who’d helped raise me after Dad died.

I quickly swiped Tom’s message away, but the damage was done. I could almost feel the rough wood of the pier beneath my hands fromthat night, when Tom had casually announced he was leaving for the yachting circuit.

Escaping Braymore.

Leaving me behind.

One impulsive moment on that beach had shattered a decade of friendship. I’d known Tom was straight, had spent years carefully guarding my feelings, until that final night when everything fell apart.

The kiss had been a mistake—a desperate, last-ditch attempt to make him understand what he meant to me.

Everyone is so worried.

The worst part wasn’t even leaving—it was knowing I’d abandoned Katie and my mother to deal with the aftermath. They’d supported me through everything, and how had I repaid them? By disappearing in the middle of the night like a coward, leaving them to sort out the mess of Seabreeze Sailing in the wake of my grandfather’s death.

I wish they could have seen that staying would have killed me slowly—crushed under the weight of family legacy, the business I never wanted, the suffocating expectations. Every morning I’d wake up to another piece of myself drowning in that endless sea.

I couldn’t go back. Not yet. Not when the mere thought of those narrow streets and watchful eyes made my chest constrict, when every memory of that beach felt like another anchor trying to drag me under.

That didn’t make the guilt any easier to bear. Tom almost undoubtedly thought I’d fled from Braymore that night because he’d rejected me, but that wasn’t the truth. Not the whole truth, anyway.

It was what happened an hour later with Connor that was the nail in the coffin.

Before my thoughts could spiral into absolute oblivion, I looked up again. That man had shifted position. Both hands in his pockets now, but still watching. Still smiling that knowing little smile that made my stomach flip.

I couldn’t help it—stealing repeated glances at the gorgeous stranger who’d apparently decided I was the most interesting thing on this entire street. Though, to be fair, my competition was a lamppost.

Several other guys had noticed him, standing there alone—not surprising, given that he was six feet worth of pure hotness. But he seemed hellbent on ignoring them to stare at me.

I checked behind my shoulder.

Nope.

Nothing.

Should I… smile? Wave? Run for the hills?

Fuck it.

Back home, I was known for my stubbornness.Like a tide against a cliff face, my grandfather often said, when my freezing stiff fingers fumbled with the last knot. Katie called it infuriating, my sheer bloody-minded persistence.

Besides, I most certainly didn’t come out tonight wearing this cute-as-fuck jumper just to stand on a roadside.

Twenty-five years old and still a virgin—that’s what happens when you spend your youth in a tiny tourist town where everyone knows your business. But London was different. Here, I could finally be myself. Tonight was about new beginnings, about finally living my life on my terms.

My feet carried me across the road before my brain could catch up. A car passed in front of me, and when I looked back into the smoking garden, the man had disappeared inside. I joined the queue, the memory of that stranger’s gaze still following me, prickling across my skin like static electricity.

A hen party laughed ahead of me, while theatre performers chatted behind.

Everyone seemed to be part of a group. A team.Something.

And here was me all alone, Billy No Mates.

I shrank further into my jumper. What was I even doing here? Emma clearly wasn’t coming. I should just go back to the flat, take a long hot shower until the water ran out, pretend tonight never happened—

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