Page 44 of Riding Jamie

“Oakley, baby, what?—”

“What thefuckis this?”

The words are accompanied by a stack of papers that get shoved into the center of my chest. The impact forces a wheeze from my lungs, and I stumble back in surprise. Guilt flashes inOakley’s eyes for just a second as I reach up to fumble for the papers, but her anger returns quickly.

I stumble for words, trying not to let the papers fall, but much more concerned about whatever’s going on with my girl.

“What’s what?” I ask, glancing back and forth between the pages and her face.

It looks like chat messages, something from an old internet messenger that probably doesn’t even work anymore. My brows furrow in confusion when I see my dad’s email linked to half of the messages. The others are listed as coming from David Montgomery.

I blink in shock, bringing the papers closer to my face as I read through the exchanges. They’re marked up with someone’s handwritten notes, dates and legalese that doesn’t make any sense littered around the text. What does any of this have to do with blackmail? Our dads don’t get along, but I’ve never heard anything about the reason behind it. My dad’s always said that David was a thief, but everything here points at my dad being the one who was trying to extort Oakley’s dad.

“I—where’d you even get these?”

She laughs humorlessly, her hands curling into fists at her sides.

“So youknew?” she accuses. “You knew what your dad did this whole time, and you’ve just let me believe that they had some random feud we’d never get the story behind? What the fuck, Jamie? I can’t be with someone who’d keep something like this from me! How am I?—”

“Whoa, whoa, this is the first time I’ve ever seen this!” I cut her off, trying to stop myself from shouting. “I don’t know anything about—about fuckingblackmail. Jesus Christ, Oakley, do you think I’d keep something like that from you?”

The dull ache of my still healing muscles has nothing on the way my heart cracks open in my chest every time she looks at me like that.

She doesn’t answer me, her face twisting into something conflicted and angry. I feel the loss of her eyes on me like a physical blow when she turns her gaze to the wall on the other side of the room.

Is it just going to be like this, over and over? Will I ever get her to trust me?

“Oakley, where did you get this?” I keep my voice even, setting the papers down gently on my bed. My frustration is mounting, but letting myself explode isn’t going to fix anything.

“I ran into Shane,” she admits, still not meeting my eyes. “He said his aunt is a lawyer and she was helping my dad a while back. I guess he decided to drop the case.”

Or he was blackmailed into dropping it.

“Shane?” I scoff, taking a step back from her as the frustration in my gut boils over into full blown fury. “Your little boyfriend from New York gave you some weird fucking papers, and you just believed him?”

Oakley turns hurt eyes onto me. Her mouth drops open in shock and anger, but I can’t bring myself to regret the words.

She doesn’t really trust this guy more than she trusts me, does she?

“Are you fucking serious?” Her voice rises closer to a shout with every word, and she advances on me to press a finger into my chest. “This is aboutus! You’re really going to try to make it about Shane?”

“You don’t know him, Oakley! You don’t know anything about this guy!” I shout. “What, his random aunt who we’ve never heard anything about just so happens to have paperwork from a case that she never even tried? And she decided to give itto him because, what, he fucking asked? You can’t just jump to conclusions like this!”

My chest heaves with the force of my breath as I try desperately to calm myself down. I don’t want to yell at her. I don’t want to fight with her in the first place, especially not about this. All I want is for things to be easy again, for us to trust each other like we did in high school, to have each other’s backs and never waver for a second.

There are tears in her eyes, and I want nothing more than to wrap her up in my arms and promise to fix this. I know that this isn’t something I can fix on my own.

“There’s something off about this whole situation,” I say, glad my voice is a little steadier. “There’s something off about Shane, too. You have to see that.”

Her face crumples, and my heart shatters at the sight of a tear streaking down her cheek.

“Leave Shane out of this, Jamie. He’s my friend. He may have feelings I don’t return, but he’s proved that he likes me as a person, not just because he wants to date me,” she says staunchly. “No matter what you think about him, the paperwork doesn’t lie.”

I have to turn away to stop myself from shouting in anger, frustrated and hurt and trying to get a grasp on myself. My shoulders shake with agony and defeat, and the realization that all I can do is give up hurts so much more than I thought it could.

I already lost her once. I swore I’d never let it happen again, but here I am.

All I can do is step back, now, isn’t it?

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