Page 66 of Promise Not To Fall

“I can’t believe Wesley,” Rylee says repeatedly, in shock. “I can’t believe this.”

I have to remind myself that to Rylee, Wesley having sex with another girl is probably a surprise to her. To me it isn’t. I saw early on he is that way.

Not Rylee, though. She saw the side he showed her. The loving and nurturing side that bought her flowers every Sunday and coffee every morning. He played that one well.

“What are you going to do? Is he leaving early?” I ask as we sit there watching the waves on the beach. I keep looking up the beach, remembering my many walks up this very path. It all seems so distant already, and it only happened the other day.

“No, he’s coming back with us and then moving out.” Rylee glances at me, brushing sand off her as we walk back to the hotel. “Can I move in with you for a little while? I can’t afford that place on my own.”

“Yeah.” Then I sigh, wrapping my arm around her. “I need to find another client when we get back.”

“You should work at a place like this.” She points to the concierge desk when we’re walking through the lobby. “I tried to book snorkeling yesterday, and they sent me diving with those helmets.”

“They have swimming pigs here too.” I start laughing, about to tell her about Jake and the pigs, but then I stop. She doesn’t need to hear that right now.

“Seriously? Pigs swim?”

“That was my first reaction too. It’s the weirdest thing. They’re like little fish.”

Looking closer at the concierge desk, I kind of see her and Stevie’s point about the job. This isn’t any different from what I do back home. Maybe not as many celebrities, but there’s certainly a demand. People travel and need others to take care of things for them. The Atlantis is the premier spot in Nassau, and loads of wealthy people stay here and need the help I can offer. It’d be cool, right? Living in the Bahamas.

Rylee notices right away my brain is working.

“Fuck, you’ve gone completely sideways for him, haven’t you?”

My head hangs. “You’re telling me. It’s awful. Now I’m thinking of ways to stay here like it’d actually change something.”

We make it inside the hotel and to the elevators when I notice Amara, Jake’s ex-girlfriend, walking toward us. At first I wonder why she’s here, and then I realize she’s probably here to see Alicia.

“Hey…” She stops in front of me, a certain sadness to her eyes. “Kendall, right?”

I nod, apprehensive as towhyshe would be talking to me.

“Did you have fun the other night?” Amara asks, looking from me to Rylee, and then back again. “At Club Naz?”

“Yeah, it was fun.”

I think she can tell I’m not exactly into small talk with her, but she surprises me when she says, “I’m not the heartless bitch Jake probably told you I am.”

I swallow over the lump forming in my throat at the mention of his name. “He never said that.”

In fact, Jake had said very little about her, other than the fact that she cheated on him.

Amara nods, chewing on her bottom lip. “Well, I suppose you think I am now?”

She cheated on him. Of course I thought that. “I don’t know anything about you.”

Just before she walks away, her eyes glaze over, as if she had let something go she knew she shouldn’t have… much like at the bar when she saw me standing where she should have been, on his arm. “Until you’ve loved one boy your entire life, you don’t know what I was thinking, so please don’t judge me. He was drowning me. I was suffocating, and I needed out. I didn’t do it the way I should have, but I did it. I didn’t know there was anything else out there but what we had, and then when I left with another guy, I regretted it. I regret the look on his face.”

I knew that look. I knew the sharp pain in my chest, the painful reminder.

And then Amara walks away, and I’m left dumbfounded. For two reasons. I’m holding Rylee as she cries, because Amara has just given her a painful reminder of what happened to her, but I’m reminded of that same look Jake had given to me too.

I had done exactly the same thing Amara had done to him.

I hadn’t realized how much that mattered until now.

Rylee and I don’t spend much time upstairs, and then we decide to go to dinner at Carmine’s in the hotel. Immediately we order a bottle of wine, because why not? Wine makes everything better.

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