Page 64 of Break Point
UNTIL LAST NIGHT
OCTOBER 9, 2010
MY RIGHT EAR BURNS,apparently from sleeping on my right side all night. Even though I was knocked out, I don’t feel like I got any rest.
With eyes closed, I reach out for my phone on the nightstand to check the hour. It’s 7:15 a.m. I wish I could go back to sleep, but I simply can’t. I’m too tired and feeling too sick to do so.
My mouth and throat feel dry, so I sit up and take a few sips of the water Henry left for me on Gemma’s nightstand. Flashbacks of last night hit me in erratic surges. I don’t trust myself to know what’s real and what’s not. I wish some of those memories were dreams, but they’re not. I do remember kissing Henry, though. I’m trying to piece out my conversation with him, but I cannot access it in a linear timeline.
All I know is I fucked up badly by kissing him. Not only did I cheat on Liam by doing so, but I’m afraid of losing Henry because of it. Why would he deem me a trustworthy person after this?
My head feels like it’s about to explode, and I remember Henry giving me two Tylenol last night, so I guess those didn’t work. Or they did, and only God knows what state I would’ve found myself in this morning if I hadn’t taken them.
I take a deep breath and let it out with a sigh, remembering howHenry said he’d pick me up at eight for tennis practice. I hope he said that out of anger, to teach me a lesson for drinking when I shouldn’t have. The thought of training today feels like a stretch. Impossible. I’ll be lucky if I make it downstairs without passing out.
“Morning, pretty,” Liam says in his lovely accent. His unexpected presence makes me flinch. I turn to see him lying next to me in Gemma’s king-sized bed.
He’s fully clothed, wearing jeans and a button-down shirt with half the buttons undone. I’m embarrassed and invaded by a heavy feeling of dread of knowing what kind of conversation we’re about to have. I’m going to hurt him. There’s no way around the inevitability of it. There’s no way I can keep that kiss with Henry from last night hidden from him, nor do I want to keep it a secret.
There’s no easy or painless way to do it, but I know I have to rip off the Band-Aid and come clean about it.
“Good morning,” I reply, doing my best to summon a smile before realizing that doing so only intensifies the building pressure behind my eyes. The nerves about the anticipation of what’s about to happen have reached my stomach, filling it with butterflies of the ugly kind.
“How are you feeling?” he asks, opening his arms and wiggling his fingers. “Come here.”
I rest my cheek against his chest. He wraps his arms around my waist and presses a kiss to my hair. I love and care about him so damn much, but I’m not in love with him. Deep down, I know Liam’s not the one for me, and it kills me, because I really thought he was. Or that he could be. But that was before Henry came back into my life and lit a match I can’t seem to put out.
I hate him for it.
I hate that what I feel for him is so consuming, it pulled me in and tipped everything over the edge. But I’m ready to face the consequences head-on.
“I missed you,” Liam says softly, caressing my arm with his fingers. “I was worried sick about you last night.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, my voice low and broken. “I messed up.”
“It’s okay. We’ve all had one of those nights when we had too much to drink. You’re probably exhausted and jet-lagged from your trip.”
“Henry and I kissed last night,” I confess, surprised by my own bluntness.
It hurts even more to say it out loud. And I’m a coward for not looking at him as I say this. He deserves at least that much. So I sit up and meet Liam’s gaze, taking in how his lovely brown eyes are clouded with hurt and confusion. He must feel blindsided. Watching his pain unfold right in front of me is breaking the part of my heart that still belongs to him.
He gnaws at his lower lip and looks away, seemingly at a loss for words. The silence stretches, heavy and unbearable, as I brace myself for him to explode, to tell me what a horrible person I am. But I’ll listen. I’ll take it. Even though I was ready to end things, I’ll let him be the one to say it’s over and that I don’t deserve him because I don’t. I know I don’t. Right now, I don’t feel deserving of anything good.
Finally, he sits on the edge of the bed, and I hurry to sit beside him, my way of letting him know I’m ready and wide open to receive the blow that’s coming. But it never comes. Instead, he looks me in the eye and says, “Does he love you, Belén?” His voice threatens to break, but it doesn’t. “Like I love you?”
This is the first time Liam tells me that he loves me. It throws me off balance. I wasn’t expecting him to say it, and his question is not one that I have the answer to. At least not at this moment. Henry loves and cares for me as a friend, that much I know. And when he kissed me, it felt like time stood still, like everything in this world clicked and made sense. Like everything was perfect and I didn’t feel as alone, angry, and sad as I usually do. But those were my feelings and my experience. Even if an optimistic side of me tells me Henry might feel the same way I do—hopes that he does—I’m not feeling optimistic. Or hopeful about anything, really.
“I don’t know, Liam,” I admit. “We barely talked after it happened. He said it was a mistake. That we’d messed up. And then he left.”
Laying it out like that is brutal. But I owe him the truth.
“So he gets to kiss you, call it a mistake, and walk away like some noble martyr?” Liam scoffs, bitterness creeping into his voice.
I flinch, but I can’t argue with him. What else is there to say?
“What is it that you want, Belén?” he asks, his warm honey eyes locked onto mine.
The shame and guilt twist inside me like a knife.
