Page 56 of Salvaged Heart
“It’s not what it looks like.”
Well, fuck, he said it.
Not sure what else the two of us half naked, pressed into one another and making out furiously against the cabinet, was supposed to look like, but I suddenly felt no desire to be aroundfor the explanation. I bent down and grabbed our shirts off the floor, thrusting his at him before slipping mine on and turning to storm away.
“No, Anders.” Laurel’s voice came from behind me.
It was calm but fierce, a terrible storm brewing beneath the surface of her well-polished exterior, so incredibly like her father that it stopped me in my tracks.
“I let you run from me once before without demanding any explanation from you, but I won’t do it again.” She breathed in sharply, spitting the following words through what sounded like gritted teeth. “You need to tell me what the hell I just walked in on.”
I snapped back around, glaring at Beck, who remained frozen, still wearing only his boxer briefs, shirt half pulled up his arms, but he hadn’t managed to get it over his head. He just stood there like a statue, hair messy from where my fingers had been pulling at it, lips puffy and kissed raw, eyes trained on the blank space between my sister and me. He was no doubt trying to come up with a buyable excuse for why the two of us might have been tongue-fucking the other’s mouth only moments earlier.
“I think Beckham was about to explain that to the both of us.” I deflected.
He'd been so quick to deny what had been very obviously happening, and I, sure as hell, wouldn’t be the one to come up with the lies for him. The second she'd made her presence known, he'd put as much distance as he possibly could between the two of us and shut down like I was some shameful secret.
Damnit, I deserved better than that.
After several minutes that stretched like hours, he finally seemed to kick his tongue into motion, but all he managed to produce was an unintelligible garble of, “I…we…You see. Anders…and.”
For the love of God.
“This is so freaking typical.” Laurel was talking again, eyes drilled on me, seeming not even to register the stuttering mess of words coming from Beck beside me. “You can’t ever help yourself, can you?”
“Excuse me?”
“I should have known you'd pull something like this.” She spat the words, each laced with deadly venom.
“Look, Laurel,” I held my hands up in my best attempt of surrender. I probably looked like I was trying to calm a rabid animal, and if I was being honest, she didn’t look much different from one. Her eyes were practically on fire with hatred, and at that moment, if she had started frothing at the mouth, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
“I’m not sure what you think you’re talking about, but I can assure you that it is not the case.”
“You haven’t changed a bit.”
I'd changed more than she would ever understand, but her being able to recognize that in me would take longer than a five-minute yelled conversation and rely on hereverknowing me in the first place. Still, the words cut deep. All those negative voices I'd finally put to rest were once again rising in my head.
Useless, failure, good for nothing, addict.
“I don’t know why I thought it would be different this time. I don’t know why I thought in the years I hadn’t seen or heard from you that maybe you had grown up. Maybe you had stopped taking what belonged to everybody else and using it for your fucking benefit. All you do is take, take, take, Anders. Use, use, use.”
She was fully up to steam now. It was practically rupturing from her ears. She threw her purse on the counter and stormed over to me, pressing a manicured fingernail into my chest. “I knew when they read the contents of Aunt Millie’s will that ifyou came back, it would only be for your own gain. I knew your involvement would only last long enough to get a paycheck, and then you'd slip back out of my life again like you were never even here.
“Then you showed up, and you actually seemed to be making an effort to patch things up between us. You actually seemed to give a damn about me.” She scoffed as if the idea of such a thing was the funniest joke she'd ever heard. “But now it all makes sense. I saw it in your eyes the first time you saw him. I saw how you looked at him, like he was a shiny new toy, and I told myself I was seeing things. I forced myself to believe that I was the one in the wrong. That it was me who was the problem, me who needed to try harder. Me who needed to be more trusting.”
I glanced over to the still mute Beck, who was staring at the floor like he was wishing it would open up and swallow him whole. Laurel just shook her head in disbelief.
“As usual, you just wanted another thing for yourself.”
“Laurel…”
“I’m done with you.” She dismissed me, but I was fired up now.
Like hell, I would back down after she'd just stood there throwing insults at me as if she even had the slightest insight into my life. “No, it’s my turn. You are jumping to all these conclusions over here, but I don’t get a chance to defend myself?”
“Why bother when all that comes out of your mouth is self-serving lies anyway?”
Now would be a really good time for Beck to open his mouth and support me, but of course, he seemed to have nothing to add.
