Page 26 of Ghosted By Texas

“I’m not accusing you of anything inappropriate. I started everything. All I’m saying is that if I hadn’t been so exhausted and emotionally rung out, none of that would have happened.”

“The fact that you were emotionally rung out speaks volumes, Becs. It means you still have feelings for me.”

“No, it means I have regrets and repressed feelings of loss. I never grieved the end of our relationship until last night because I packed it all up and stuffed it in a neat little box inside my brain with all my memories of you.”

“I remember doing something similar,” Austin admitted. “That doesn’t change things. All those old feelings are still there, whether it’s because we never dealt with them or we should still be together, is the thing we need to work through.”

My earlier chuckle turned into a full-fledged laugh. There was no way he could be serious. The asshole admitted to going back to being fuck buddies with his future wife.

"Did you sleep with, and I’m clarifying here when I say fuck, have oral sex, finger, or otherwise engage physically with Jordan that night?”

“No, I swear to you that I didn’t. Houston was there almost the whole time. He saw that she was sleeping on the couch, and I was sitting up in the chair waiting on you to call when he got ready to leave. She woke up a few minutes after he left the house, and I took her straight back to her house.”

“Okay, then how long was it before you started back to your fuck buddy situation with her?”

“Please, don’t go there. It has no bearing on what happened between us.”

“How long?”

“A couple weeks. I thought I could fuck your memory away and she was there. For the record, it didn’t work.”

“A couple weeks?” I questioned as I remembered what happened two weeks after that fateful Valentine’s Party. “No wonder she was so smug that day,” I muttered to myself.

“What are you talking about?”

“The day Jordan came to find me on campus was exactly two weeks after the Valentine’s Day party,” I explained. That was the day she told me all about how you didn’t even miss me because the two of you were fucking, and how you believed everything she told you that night. So, there you go. You slept with her to get me out of your system, and she came straight to me to remind me of what I lost and whose arms you fell back into.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he groaned. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t think-”

I cut him off. “That seems to be the way of things with you where she’s concerned. You don’t think, but she always has a plan and everyone around you gets hurt. Not you though, because she soothes away your ache before you can even feel the loss.”

I could see the disbelief in his eyes. He still didn’t think she had it in her to be so calculating as to run everyone in his life off to keep him all to herself. That was the crux of the problem back then and nothing had changed.

“You don’t plan on fixing your Jordan problem. I don’t plan on dealing with it for you, so this,” I stated as I waved my hand back and forth between the two of us, “can never happen again.”

Austin sighed. “Becs, she’s not a problem. I swear it to you. We’ve talked about all that shit, the expectations and she’s even dated other people over the years too.”

“Real people, who you’ve met?”

“Yes,” he rolled his eyes as he answered though, which pissed me off. “I’ve met a few of them.”

Something told me there was more to that story than I would ever get from him, but it was a drastic change from the dynamic they had years earlier where Jordan never dated anyone else.

“It’s been six years, don’t you think if I really wanted to be with Jordan, I would be?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “You are though. You hang out, work together, and she still has plans to be with you, whether you think she does or not.”

“I don’t want to be in a romantic relationship with her. That will never happen because she’s not who I want. What the hell do I have to do to convince you of that?”

“That’s just it, Austin, you can’t. You tried before, and you failed. You failed me, anyway. It was her test that you passed. It was Jordan who you chose.”

“I didn’t choose her.”

“In her mind, you did, and that’s all that matters.”

“What about in your mind?”

“You left me that night and never considered my safety. You never called, texted, met up with me, came to see if I even made it home okay. What if I had been in the hospital after being attacked? How do you think I would have felt to wake up and find out you weren’t there?”

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