Page 16 of Obsessed with the Heartbreaker

“Campbell.Jeez, you scared me, dude.”

“Don’t call me dude.”

The guy gulped. “Right. Sorry.”

People called me an asshole, a Heartbreaker, and a King for a reason. I needed to keep up appearances.

“You have what I want?”

He nodded enthusiastically, wanting to get on my good side again like an obedient puppy. “Yes, uh…Things seem to be going on as normal. Nothing nefarious going on. I haven’t seen him meet up with anyone, and, well, other than the guy in class that he usually competes with for the first spot, he definitely has no enemies.”

“Good.”

Something had been tickling my nose since Antony came. Because, why now, right? There had to be a reason. The paranoid part of my brain had conjured images of Antony being made against his will to spy on me or something, or that maybe someone was giving him trouble and he needed my help.

Only he probably wouldn’t come to me in the last case, would he? That wasn’t what we were to each other anymore.

I pulled out my wallet and took a fifty.

The guy went to get it but before he could, I pulled it back, leaving his greedy hand hanging. “Definitely no other news?”

He shook his head.

Fine.

I gave him the money.

Crumpling it messily and putting it in his back-pocket, he now seemed to have relaxed, good mood returning. “Are you and Andino enemies or something? You’ve been having me spy on him for months but…really, he might very well be the most boring guy in the world. There’s nothing interesting about him.”

My fists tightened, itching for some idiotic reason to get a hold of this dummy and teach him some manners. Why I would still feel the need to defend Antony’s honor was something that I didn’t want to look too closely at, and least of all at this guy’s request.

“None of your business. Don’t ask again.”

I didn’t even know how to put what Antony and I were into words, how could I explain it to anyone else?

We’d been neighbors, once upon a time. Or he and my parents had been, more like, since I’d been going to boarding schools for as long as I could remember. I was only spared in my last year of high school, when they allowed me to attend locally.

Antony Andino was the last person I thought about most days before I went to sleep.

The one I tried not to think about as I fucked someone’s brains out.

And the only person who had ever come close to breaking the Heartbreaker’s heart.

At one point, I’d called him a friend. Orhehad, anyway, because God knows I never found a word to describe the tingly feeling I felt each time I caught sight of him.

I’d had every reason to hate him, the green-eyed guy who my parents saw fit to dote on even more than their own son. The perfect student, goodie-two-shoes, responsible, hard-working, and disciplined, where I was messy, chaotic, and rebellious.

But one look at him had told me I could never hate him.

Because he hadn’t been the arrogant entitled bastard neighbor I’d been expecting, the one I’d wanted to serve some humble pie to. Antony had looked at me, quiet but not shy, sending me a grin that made his eyes glitter, and told me with his characteristic dry humor that I looked like an eighteenth-century rake. With my hair down to my collarbones and my roguish walk. Then he’d proceeded to invite himself to sit beside me on my porch, offered me some of the ice cream he was eating, and started talking to me like we’d been lifelong friends.

I’d wanted to hate him so bad and had instead frozen in shock. Even without knowing how special this was, I’d been so ridiculouslyflatteredfor some reason that I’d simply started talking back to him, but mostly, I’d simply basked in the way his dry humor had made my heart flutter inside my chest.

I’d relived the moment in my head several times even months after, after I got to know just how rare this version of him had been.

I’d treated it like a treasure.

But that was then, and now was now.

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