I put my head in my hands, pinch my eyes shut, hoping to drown out the world. “I know. I know it’s not okay. I fucked up.” I breathe in deep but everything hurts. “I fucked up.”
“Yeah,” she says quietly. “You did. And I’m sure I should just give you the benefit of the doubt but…I can’t. I just can’t. These pictures they’re…I’ll never stop seeing them. Never stop picturing you with her.”
I stare at her, imploring her with my eyes but I already see the wall between us. “This can’t just end. It was just beginning.”
“It was a role to you Emmett, that’s all it was.”
“It was never a role. It was always real. Alyssa…I love you. More than I can even say. Please, don’t leave it like this, leave me like this. How I feel about you is the only true thing I have.”
God, please, let these words get through to her!
She breathes in deep through her nose, shaking. “I need to go.”
She heads to the door.
I need to run after her.
I need to stop her.
I need to cry and plead and beg.
But I don’t.
My heart hurts too much to even move.
Chapter 19
Alyssa
Broken.
There’s no other word for it.
There are other words for how I’m feeling. Humiliated. Embarrassed. Ashamed. Angry. Sad. Depressed.
But the word that says it all right now is…broken.
I’m no longer a whole human but one that’s splintered and fragmented and made up only of jagged parts.
On Saturday morning I got the email that was addressed to both me and Emmett. The email that ruined us and everything we shared together. It ruined the future I thought we had. It ruined a love I thought we had.
It broke me into a million pieces before I even heard the truth from Emmett’s mouth.
Him with her. Autumn, who represents everything I’m not. Tanned, tall, skinny, effortlessly beautiful. Successful. She’s the polar opposite of me in every way.
And she’s Emmett’s type. Not just in the fact that he dated and screwed so many actresses and models that looked just like her before I came around. It’s the fact that he specifically slept with her before. He says it only happened once…I believe him. But I also believe that’s why when she kissed him, he let it happen.
The thing is…I know that Emmett was probably telling the truth. He’s an honest guy, especially about his misdeeds and shortcomings but…
Fuckity fuck fuck.
He just broke my fucking heart.
Is he that easy to take advantage of when drunk? How many times has this happened before?
And…what if I never showed up at his door, if we never got that email…would he have told me what happened?
That’s what I have a hard time wrestling with. Because as honest as he is, I can’t forget his type, the person he was before he met me. I believed him when he says he loved me, I really did but…I just think maybe his idea of love is skewed. I couldn’t even blame him for that, not with his upbringing and losing his mom, not with his job and essentially lying for a living. After all, how can loving me really change a person? How can I make him stop being the person he was and become someone else?
I’m just Alyssa Martin.
And I don’t think I have that kind of power over him, over anyone.
How can a relationship built on a lie ever feel like the truth?
And how the fuck am I ever going to get over him when it feels like I don’t even possess my heart anymore. I left it at his house, where it lays shattered on his floor. Now I’m just scooped out inside, hollow, a space that only darkness can fill.
It’s killing me.
Honestly, I don’t know if I’ve ever really loved, ever really hurt before.
Not like this, never like this.
I walked straight off that cliff.
Why am I even surprised I hit the ground?
“How could he?” I cry out suddenly over my glass of wine.
I’m plopped down on my bed, the wine having already spilled twice as I try to balance drinking and lying down at the same time. I want to float away to oblivion and I can’t even sit upright to do it.
Tiffany and Jackie don’t say anything and when I lift my head to look over at them, Jackie in my armchair and Tiffany sitting on the floor, knees drawn up, hand in the middle of the popcorn bowl, I realize they’re exchanging a look. That look pisses me off.
“What?” I ask. “What is it?”
Their look deepens.
“Well…” Tiffany says slowly.
Yeah, Tiffany knows the truth now about Emmett and me and our whole relationship. I told her the moment that my life went to fucking hell. She wasn’t even insulted that she was kept in the dark for so long. She just said, “You’re smart, I probably would have told everyone. Accidently, of course.”
“Well what? Come on guys,” I plead. “This is part of the grieving process, isn’t it?”
Jackie shrugs. “Me and Will never broke up.”
“Ken’s the only boyfriend I’ve ever had,” Tiffany adds.
“What the fuck?” I glare at them, rolling over on my side. “Neither one of you have an idea what I’m going through? That’s it. Carla!” I yell. “Get your ass in here!”
Within seconds my bedroom door opens and Carla appears, her hair wrapped up in a bandana, holding a bottle of beer. “Are you finally inviting me to join your pity party?”
“Are you high?” I ask her.
She shrugs.
“Anyway, tell me about the last time your heart was broken.”
She leans against the doorway, eyes staring off, tapping her finger against the bottle. “It was July, 1994. We had met at the waterpark, shared a stick of Juicy Fruit…”
“Just sit your butt down and make me feel better,” I tell her.
She sits on the edge of the bed and looks me over. “I think you’re being too harsh on him.”
“What?” I exclaim. “I’m being too harsh? Do you even know the rules of a pity party?”
“I mean, the guy has to pay you forty thousand dollars, right? And now this blackmailer fifty thousand? And he just lost his role on Boomerang? The dude is out close to a hundred grand and just lost his job. Give him a break.”
I’m slack-jawed. “First off, I’m not taking the money. And, Carla, he cheated on me!”
“Kissing isn’t cheating,” she says with a scoff.
But both Jackie and Tiffany make urgent sounds of protest.
“I would cut off Will’s balls if he kissed another woman.”
“I would put Nair in Ken’s hair oil,” Tiffany seethes, “and then I’d switch his toothpaste with hemorrhoid cream, and then I’d cover him in honey from head to toe and push him off a plane straight into a bear’s den, throwing down a bottle of bear spray that I actually filled with salmon-scented water. Cuz bears love that shit.”
We’re all staring openly at Tiffany and I’m making a mental note to never cheat on her.
“Anyway,” Carla says slowly, turning her attention back to me, “the girl wanted him, you suspected this yourself. She gets him drunk, she kisses him. Now you can believe he pushed her back right away or you can believe he had a full-on make-out session with her. Which one do you choose to believe?”
I still, thinking it over. “I don’t know. Both are bad.”
“Both are bad. One is worse. You can’t possibly tell me that you haven’t gotten so drunk that some guy hasn’t kissed you and it took you a few seconds to be like, whoa, no, this is wrong. Or at least a situation similar. Isn’t that the important part? The fact that Emmett stopped it?”
“But the pictures…”
“The pictures tell a half-truth, just as the pictures with you both, the pictures that started you all, told a half-truth.”
Holy crow, that feels like a whole lifetime ago.
“Now it comes down to you and Emmett,” she goes on, “it comes down to trust. Either you trust Emmett or you don’t. If you don’t well…then you needed to break up. Because there is no relationship without trust, not a real one anyway. But maybe you guys have been so busy faking it that you’ve both forgotten what it’s like.”