Page 13 of Lucky Star

“What would you call it then?”

“I never meant for you to feel that way.” I pinched the bridge of my nose with my good hand. “I never meant for any of this to happen.”

I’d hoped to make Sarah understand, the but longer this conversation went on, the worse it became. I wasn’t great with words, I knew that, but this was epically bad—even for me. I speared my hands into my hair and gasped when my rapidly-swelling knuckles got caught in a snarl.

“You’re going to need to get that looked at.”

“I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”

“Good.”

She drove in silence for several more miles, and I wondered if she knew where she was heading. Eventually, seeing the sign for the Pacific Coast Highway, she took the road north toward Malibu.

Pulling into an empty parking lot overlooking the crashing Pacific, she killed the engine and turned to face me, her back pushed up against the door. “You wanted to talk, so talk.”

“I’ve missed you,” I all but whispered.

“No, you don’t get to say that. You don’t get to sit there and tell me how you miss me, or how hard this has been on you when you’re the one that abandoned me in the middle of the night. You didn’t even call me to find out how I was doing! You don’t get to try and make me feel sorry for you. You get to explain, and that is all.” As she spoke, she sat forward in her seat, each word punctuated by a jab of her finger.

Against my will, a small smile tugged at my lips. “That’s one of the things I love—”

“No!” she hollered, cutting me off. “Don’t you dare use that word with me.” And then she burst into great, big sobbing tears, the likes of which I’d never seen before.

Sarah hated crying because she thought it made her look weak, but she was the furthest thing from that. She was strength and vulnerability rolled into one strong, formidable package. When she did cry, it was with reason. And this time, that reason was me. Not her mom, not the insane hours she worked, not even her favorite Kleenex commercial.

This was all my fault.

“Don’t cry.” I put my good hand on her thigh, and she flinched and flung my hand away.

“You don’t get to touch me anymore.”

“Don’t say that.”

“As if I’d let you touch me again …” She sucked in a lungful of air. “Not after the last time.”

“Touching your leg in comfort is not the same thing, and you know it.”

“There you go again, not even able to say it. Fucked. Fucked. Fucked. Say it, Cameron, ‘When we fucked.’”

I grimaced. “It shouldn’t have happened like that.”

“Like what? Me drunk and begging you to fuck me?” She was screaming now, her breathing erratic. But just as quickly as she’d broken down, she took a deep breath, blinked, and when she opened her eyes, her mask was back in place.

“No,” I answered. “Like we were too drunk to consider the ramifications of our actions.”

She swiped at her tears, and I was thankful she’d stopped crying. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to do when a woman started bawling, or that I thought less of her for having done so. It was just that when Sarah cried, I couldn’t take it. It’d always been that way. The first time I’d watched her battle her tears had been when she’d mistakenly answered her phone and had to spend the next twenty minutes being degraded by her mother. Even now, my chest physically ached when I thought about her being in pain. That I was the cause of her anguish made things so much worse.

“Oh please,” she sneered, brushing my comment aside. “I was sober by the time we made it to my bedroom. I knew exactly what I was doing and what I’d asked for.”

“You were sober?” That changed everything. And yet, it changed nothing.

“Oh my god,” she whispered, understanding dawning. “You weren’t?”

I swallowed. “No.”

She groaned and covered her face with her hands. “Now would be a perfect time for the earth to open up and swallow me whole.”

“You were sober.” It wasn’t a question.

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