Page 47 of Unmasked Rivalry
It is bitter, broken, and empty.
My phone pings beside me, and I look down to see a message from Knox.
Morning sunshine, thinkin’ about those sweet lips. Ride?
That actually hurts, so badly a pained noise is ripped from my throat.
He is acting like we could be something, like one day, when this is all said and done, I might mean something to him but the stark reality is, I will never mean a single fucking thing to Knox. I am a plaything, something for him to do to bypass time.
If I mattered, he would have told me.
I don’t fucking matter.
Harper was the only one who mattered.
Not me.
Never me.
I AM A QUARTER OF Abottle down, some cheap alcohol I found in my uncle's cupboard, when the rumbling of a bike alerts me that Knox is coming. I have ignored every message, every call, and I knew eventually he would show up.
So, I have sat here, on the porch, drinking the pain away, but only making it a million times worse.
It hurts.
I’m angry.
I want to scream.
I hear his boots hitting the front steps before I see him—slow, measured, deliberate, that I-own-the-world way he carries himself. I want to disappear into the planking, fall through the porch and into some fucking alternate reality where none of this has ever happened.
The door creaks and then he’s there. He just stares at me for a second, all that lazy confidence, like he could just walk back in and everything would go back to normal.
“You’ve been hiding out?” he says finally, boots thumping across the porch.
I don’t answer him.
I don’t even look at him.
I roll the bottle from one palm to the other, staring out past the yard.
“What the fuck is going on?” His eyes flick to the bottle.
I set the bottle down, stand, and refuse to look at him.
He grunts, like he’s getting impatient, but I guess even he can feel this is different. “Callie.”
I just turn and walk straight through the doorway and into the house. I don’t even check to see if he’ll follow. I know he will. I grab the laptop off the counter and jam the USB in. My hands are shaking, but I don’t care if he sees that. The audio file is still there—just sitting, taunting me. Knox comes up behind me, looming. I can hear him breathing.
“You want to tell me what the fuck is going on?” His voice is already changing, sharpening.
I turn the laptop toward him and hit play.
The voices fill the kitchen, and it’s like being punched in the stomach all over again. I watch his face as he hears it, sees the words he never wanted me to know play out aloud, the version of himself he’s careful not to show me, laid out in jagged black and white.
He doesn’t look away. He doesn’t flinch. He just stands there, jaw going hard, every line in his face turning to stone. It ends in silence. The fucking worst kind, the kind that’s heavy as an avalanche, waiting for me to breathe, waiting for me to do something, anything at all.
I wipe my face, because I don’t want to cry but my cheeks are already wet. I grab the bottle and hurl it at him. It bounces off and hits the floor, randomly smashes, glass sprinkling across the room. I wish it had taken out a chunk of his heart the way he just took out mine.
