Page 91 of Protect Me
With a nod, and a blithe avoidance of eye contact, I slipped away. Back at the register, I hailed a new customer and tried to draw in a deep breath. The cacophony of Emma’s kids descending into another wrath-fest rang through the room. Daniel rolled his eyes at the sound and disappeared into the back.
Seeing Emma after so many years didn’t shake me. The quaking deep in my bones, the remembered betrayal from so long ago, had more to do with the sheer amount of time that spanned us. Time when I’d held onto Emma as a shining example of what women innately were—or could do.
The younger Emma.
As a fifteen-year-old freshman, I’d become an obsessive sycophant, a glutton for her attention. Crawled after her, did what she wanted, fawned over her presence. First date. First kiss. First of many things, and it had all been a joke. It culminated in the humiliation of prom.
The whole affair had been very high-school, quite dramatic, and caused a stir bigger than it should have. Emma spread lies about me, carried on the lips of other teenagers in the hallways for weeks. Laughs. Whispered rumors. Giggles from other girls. Some wouldn’t even look at me after what she did. Every male knew she played with her food before devouring it.
I learned the hard way.
Grady had taken down two of the worst offenders to my pride, earning himself detention twice in two weeks. Hernandez had been more sneaky—he attacked gossiping football players off campus, the ones that tried to do the most damage to my name. Bastian growled his way into lunchroom conversations, shutting them down. In the months that followed, the Merry Idiots helped to salvage my pride.
Then I did the rest.
Playboy Vik rose to the spotlight, the lover of many. Flying lips, they said. My name became synonymous with conquest, not much else.
For years.
Like an open wound, a gap broke inside me. Emma Goldmann had moved on—into some unhappy, nondescript life that I should have seen coming for someone like her—yet I hadn’t. After she was physically out of my life, I’d let her stay. Let her affect me in more ways than I deserved.
The truth slammed into me with centrifugal force: I kept her nasty business alive when it should have been dead long ago.
All this time, Emma lived and breathed in my thoughts, to what end?
We’d been children. She moved on. I held on. It marked both of our lives. I breathed through the ugly truth, the pain, because now Kate stood in startling disparity to Emma in real life.
Did I want to keep proving Emma wrong?
Did I need to be the same asshole to others that she’d been to me?
No.
I never should have.
Burrowed beneath all those layers of pain that throbbed again, for the first time in how-many-years, came a quiet voice. A whisper of truth that I couldn’t deny, even when faced with the nastiness of trauma.
There has never been another woman like Kate.
No matter how far I ran, how many women swooned, or how much fun I had across all experiences in life, I’d never felt what Kate stirred up in me now.
Never again,I promised myself.Never again.
A man came to the counter to buy wool hiking socks, and I croaked my way through the transaction. Emma ushered her kids toward the door, sent a discreet look to me out of the corner of her eye, and disappeared without a word. I had a feeling I knew why.
I would have done the same.
A voice to my right caused my painful heartbeats to squeeze to a stop, followed by the gentle touch of a hand on my arm.
“Vik?”
I turned to find Kate there, smiling. She wore a hat, her hair down underneath it. A pair of sunglasses perched on top of the brim reflected my startled, yet relieved, expression.
“Hey.” She held up a bag. “I brought you lunch. If you have a minute, could we go talk outside?”
I yanked her in a long-armed, too-tight hug. She paused, clearly startled, then put her arms around my waist. When she squeezed, all the weird parts inside dissipated. There was no force more powerful than the sun.
Katelyn wasmysun.
