Page 48 of Beneath Your Beautiful
Not that it worked with Joss. She’d obviously wanted more. “Whatdoyou want from me?”
He rubbed his jaw and squinted into the distance. I waited to hear what would come out of his mouth and hoped it would be a real answer. We’d been doing this dance for too long and this push and pull was giving me whiplash. “I can’t get you out of my head. I think about you all the time.”
It didn’t answer my question, but I felt the same way about him. I was surprised he’d admitted it. We sat in silence, and I replayed the night in my head.
I’m Joss. Killian’s former fuck buddy.
It was naïve to think Killian lived like a monk, but I’d prefer his former conquests to remain nameless and faceless. I’d rather not know that he’d just used her for sex and left afterwards.
Killian told me he didn’t only want me for sex, and I still had no idea where that left us, but I was the fool who had always rushed headlong into danger. This time was no exception.
I bumped his shoulder with mine. “Do you want to come upstairs tonothave sex?”
Chapter Eighteen
Eden
On the way upstairs, he asked to see the sketch I’d done of him. He’d never brought it up before, and I’d taken it to mean he didn’t care.
I left him in the living room and retrieved the sketch from my bedside table drawer. Sinking onto my bed, I stared at the sketch in my hands. If I hadn’t been the artist, and saw this sketch hanging on a wall, I would know it was him. I would think he was handsome. The kind of dark good looks that made you do a double-take, made you want to stop and stare if you saw him on the street. I did stop and stare the first time I saw him. I’d done it many times since then. Stolen glances, seeking him out across the room when I worked. But on closer inspection, I would see the way he was looking at the artist with hooded eyes. Did I notice the way he’d looked at me? I must have. And I would see the way the artist saw him. Now I understood why he’d never asked to see it. The sketch was too revealing.
I returned to the living room empty-handed. He looked at my hands, his brows raised. I shrugged. “I can’t find it.”
His mouth quirked in amusement and then he was laughing.
When he finished laughing, I rolled my eyes and took a seat on the sofa. “What’s so funny?”
“You.”
Yeah, he knew I was lying. My face gave everything away. I leaned my head against the sofa cushion and looked at the ceiling.
“My boyfriend cheated on me,” I said, out of the blue. “He got my best friend pregnant and now they’re living in my hometown.” Killian sat next to me and slid down on the sofa, so he was at my level. I turned my head to look at him. Then I fixed my gaze on the ceiling again and told him the Luke and Lexie story and how they’d betrayed me.
“Should I beat him up?” he asked.
I laughed. “I took care of that. I mean, I didn’t beat him up. Just his car. I went after it with a baseball bat.” After the incident with Joss, my violent reaction was probably the wrong thing to confess.
Killian chuckled. “That’s fantastic.”
“It made me feel a little bit better at the time. But then I felt lousy again. Luke and I started dating in eleventh grade and we went to college together and everything. Instead of applying to art school in a city like I wanted to, I went to the same college my parents went to. The same college my boyfriend went to. The whole time I was at Penn State, I tried to convince myself it was something I wanted.”
“But it wasn’t?”
“No. It felt like a continuation of high school,” I admitted. “I don’t know…maybe he was right about me. He said I’m too much of everything. He used to tell me I should tone it down. I think he wanted a trophy girlfriend. Someone who looked good but didn’t push back. Didn’t argue. Didn’t have so many opinions. Didn’t let her temper make her say stupid things she regretted. I tried.”
“Why?”
“Why?” I repeated.
“Why would you change anything about yourself for that asshole?”
“I didn’t, really. I just tried, but usually failed. And he wasn’t always an asshole, or I never would have been with him. Before the whole Lexie thing happened, he was everything you could want in a boyfriend. Everyone liked him…” I wracked my brain trying to remember the things I loved about Luke. It used to be easy to define, and if you’d asked me to name the guy least likely to cheat on his girlfriend, it would have been Luke. But now the only strong points I could come up with was a list of things that sounded good on a resume. Baseball team, high school quarterback, Class President, 4.0 average. Clean-cut. All-American. A politician in the making.
What made it so hard to accept was that Luke had acted like the perfect boyfriend. He never missed a birthday or holiday. He was polite with good manners. Opened car doors and respected authority figures. Teachers loved him because he followed all the rules. He’d never sat in detention or gotten a speeding ticket. I asked him once if he was ever tempted to shake up the rules or rebel against something. He’d patiently explained his views on the law and its place in society. Luke was not an anarchist or a rebel. He was a pillar of society. Yet he turned out to be a liar, a cheat, and a coward.
I’d never told anyone that I felt like Luke was trying to hold me back, trying to make me less of what I was but now all the words tumbled out. “He used to say little things in a passive aggressive way, and at the time I just brushed them off. Instead of standing up to me or pushing back when I argued with him, he’d just tell me I was being unreasonable, and he wasn’t going to discuss anything with me until I calmed down and stopped acting like a toddler.”
“He said that?” Killian asked, incensed on my behalf.
