“What happened?” Ethan asks.
“What did you do?” Liam questions at the same time.
I roll my eyes. Trust Liam to assume I’ve messed up.
Which you have. The voice in my head, eerily similar to my father’s, reminds me of my mistake. But I push it aside, dressing as rapidly as I can and shoving my things into my bag. “Nothing that can’t be fixed,” I reply, more to convince myself than them.
Ethan looks skeptical, and Liam’s expression is unreadable, but I don’t have time to explain or argue. I sling my bag over my shoulder and head for the door. Every second away from Eva now feels like an eternity.
Rushing out of the stadium, my mind is racing with what I’m going to say to her. How do you explain marrying someone in a way they don’t remember? It was her idea though, I just jumped on it.
Tracking her phone, it leads me to the seedy-looking bar that I saw Max go into, and I curse. Her car is parked outside.
I approach the open door, and a huge guy steps in front of it. “Are you a vet?” he asks, eyeing me skeptically.
“No, but my wife’s in there,” I say, feeling a thrill at the word “wife,” even under these circumstances.
“Wife?” the guy scoffs. “What are you, like twelve?”
I scowl. “Where is my wife?” I demand louder.
He turns, peering inside before stepping aside with a mocking smile. I stride in, relief flooding me as I spot her safe and sound, but it’s short-lived. She’s surrounded by a few rugged guys, looking like they’d been cast in the same mold, wearing the same clothes as fucking James Dean.
“Angel, please let’s go talk,” I urge, moving toward her where she’s sitting at the bar.
“You married me?!” she exclaims, her voice filled with disbelief and anger.
“Okay, I guess we’re doing it here then,” I mutter, hating the audience we’ve got.
“You can’t marry a woman without her knowing it, man,” the guy across the bar comments, snickering.
I feel a surge of frustration but rein it in. He doesn’t know the whole story, the intensity of what we have. “Okay, man, I didn’t ask for your opinion,” I snap back, my focus solely on her.
“How did you find me here?” she asks, frowning, and I know it’s not the moment to add my invasion of privacy to my current crime.
“It doesn’t matter right now.”
Her eyes meet mine, a storm of emotions swirling in them. I know I’ve got a lot of explaining to do and a hell of a lot to make up for. But right now, all I care about is getting through to her, making her understand. This isn’t how I wanted things to go down, but here we are. Time to face the music.
“It was your idea,” I tell her, my voice steady despite the whirlwind of emotions inside. “I went along with it.”
She sneers, disbelief etched on her face. “No, it couldn’t have been.”
I let out a sigh, fishing out my phone and walking closer to where she’s sitting. “Watch the video,” I say, handing it over.
On the screen, she’s leaning forward like she is now. “Repeat what you just said,” I prompt her in the video. “I said there was a time I thought you and I were endgame, that we’d get married, have babies.”
“What if we can? What if we got married right now? Would you do it?”
She giggles in the video, echoing through the bar.
“Don’t be stupid,” she says in the recording.
“No, I’m serious. Let’s do it now,” I prompt her in the video.
“Can we?” she asks, and the excitement is clear even in video format.
She huffs in the present, pushing the phone back to me. “I was drunk.”