Page 102 of Wicked Me
Sam’s gaze never wavered from mine, searching for something I couldn’t give him. “I’ve always loved you. I needed to tell you that much.”
He loved me, but he didn’t respect me, didn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth, whatever that was exactly. I was all too familiar with that kind of man, the kind who lied, the kind who were complete strangers. Who was this man who had just told me he loved me?
A firm resolve settled into the pit of my stomach, and just before I looked away, he must have seen my thoughts stamped in the rigid lines of my face because he said my name in a soft plea.
“Get away from me,” I said, my voice as shaky as the rest of my body.
The officers read him his rights and steered him out of the room, but I hardly glanced at his retreating figure. A collective exhale sighed from the crowd once he was gone.
Charlotte appeared at my side again, her face flushed with anger and her mouth moving, but too many things. Too many things were happening all at once, and I desperately wanted the earth to stop spinning for just one second. One second to curl my hands around my cracked heart and breathe.
30
Paige
FUELED WITH ENOUGHStyrofoam cups of coffee to power a small nation, I stayed awake the entire night at the hospital. Deep vein thrombosis, the doctors had told Charlotte. Blood clot. She would have to stay in the hospital for at least a week, and Nicole and I were happy to keep her company from our permanent spots on the couch that had been shoved into her room by one of the nurses.
Happy. Such a relative term. My mind reeled the entire night with everything that had happened. With Rick. Worry for Charlotte. Honest-to-goodness glee for Nicole.
And Sam... Even without the coffee, I wouldn’t have been able to sleep. From one minute to the next, I went from hating him, to wanting him to explain to me what the hell had happened, to fear. All-consuming fear that the man I thought I knew wasn’t the same person I had fallen in love with. That kind of fear reopened old wounds that I thought had sewed themselves shut a long time ago.
Rick had been kind and gentle during our secret rendezvous, but when the end of summer neared, he turned cold and heartless. He began talking about his wife I didn’t know he had nonstop at the dinner table while I hyperventilated into my napkin. When I stopped coming to his bedroom at night, he would steal into mine when I wasn’t there and plaster my walls with naked photos of myself. On his last day at my parents’ house, we didn’t say a word to each other. And then he was gone, leaving me with an infinite supply of shame and his baby.
It was hard not to believe that returning to D.C. had been a mistake, in more ways than one. I really had stepped into the past and relived the same lapse in judgment, this time with a different man. All of this twenty-first technology and we still didn’t have an invention that stamped all our secrets on our foreheads, scarlet-letter style. I would pay someone to be the prototype to test it out and not-so-proudly flaunt my mistakes as long as I could see others’. Because privacy is overrated, thought the girl who had only told two people about her past transgressions, and one of them was my therapist. I was the queen of secrets, but I no longer cared to have them anymore.
But a part of me just wanted to hear Sam’s voice again, to breathe in his existence like I’d been doing for the past six weeks. Without him, the air felt heavier, clogging up my throat with a sharp sting that burned into my eyes for hours.
“Paige,” Charlotte whispered, and I instantly swiped at my wet cheeks. She stared through glassy eyes, evidence of all the morphine they’d pumped through her IV, her head tilted to the side on the bleach-white pillow. She’d likely been watching me for some time.
“What? Do you need something?” I leaned forward on the couch, careful not to shift Nicole’s head in my lap too much, and rested a hand on Charlotte’s arm, ready to spring up and tackle a nurse if I had to.
“You’re sad,” she said on a sigh. Her eyelids drooped, but she fought them back open.
I shrugged at that severe understatement. “You just focus on declaring war on that blood clot.”
“My blood, the traitor. What did I do to it?” She blinked hard as if struggling to keep awake. “Want some morphine? It will make your whole chest fly away.”
