He looked concerned, beautiful, and so completely dangerous she didn’t know what to do. She let out a sob, wiping over her face with her hand. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Samantha…” He stepped closer.
But she shook her head, stopping him. “We broke up.” She cried. “He’s not coming.”
He stepped closer still, ignoring her wishes.
She heaved out a heavy breath. “Aren’t you going to say I told you so?”
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
His response was the opposite of what she’d expected. He said it with emotion. As though his own heart was breaking to see her in pain. As though all he wanted to do was hold her. She looked down to her feet. So many emotions rolled around her chest, she could hardly breathe. It was as though every emotion, every disappointment over the last six months had come crashing to the surface—and her whole world was falling apart for him to witness. Her career, her friendship, her relationship. All ending, and she didn’t want to hear he was sorry. She wanted to punch something. To scream, and yell, and hurt something the way she hurt inside.
“No!” She shouted, looking him in the eye. “Everything in my life is falling apart, and I don’t want to hear any bullshit responses like I’m sorry.”
He stepped toward her, holding out his arms, offering her comfort.
She stepped backward, emotion causing her own throat to choke her. “I should have never agreed to this. I should have just said no.” She was throwing his words back in his face, wanting to push him away. He was scary, and he was Renee’s brother, and she didn’t know if she could resist him when he looked at her like that. She took another step backward, just as Tristan lunged to grab her—but it was too late.
“Samantha!” he shouted.
But she’d already hit the water, and was sinking to the bottom of the pool. She let herself fall. Allowing the cool water to lift her hair and make her feel lighter than she had in months. There was a large splash above her, and soon Tristan’s arms were wrapped around her waist, holding her body, forcing her back to the surface. She didn’t want to go, she didn’t want his arms around her, she didn’t want any of it! She pushed at his arms, kicking her legs as hard as she could.
“Let me go!”
“Samantha, stop!”
“Let me go!”
But he didn’t answer. He kept swimming with her over to the side of the pool until they both reached the shallow end. He put her down, her clothes and hair plastered to her face and body.
“Why wouldn’t you let me go?” She sobbed.
“Because.”
“Why?” she demanded.
“Because you can’t swim!”
She suddenly stopped. Heaving as though all the oxygen had been expelled from her lungs. Because she could swim. She’d learned her junior year of high school. Right after the summer she’d spent with Tristan. “You remember.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement of fact. That was the only way his statement made any sense.
He was quiet a moment, but he grabbed her cheek as though trying to force her to look at him. “Samantha—”
“No!” she shouted again, pushing him away “You remember. Don’t you?”
He only nodded, but his eyes never faltered.
“Everything?” she questioned.
“Yes.”
She wiped over her face, over tears, and hurt, and anger. She brushed her hair back behind her ears and began walking toward the steps. “I’m going to our room to change. Then I’m going to get drunk. Don’t wait up for me.”
“Samantha—”
“Don’t wait up.” But before she stepped into the lobby to grab a key, she turned around and looked at him one last time. “And I know how to swim now, you asshole.”
Chapter Eighteen
It was nearly dusk when Tristan opened the back door of the bar and walked into the room. Samantha had already been drinking for hours, albeit slowly, because her heart wasn’t quite in it. She sat at the long oak counter, passing her rum and coke back and forth between her fingers. The ice had melted long ago, causing a gradient separation between soda and water, where her eyes were focused now, tired, puffy, and empty.
He sat down next to her, two seats away, and braced his forearms on the counter to order a drink. “Whiskey and water, please,” he said to the bartender, though he didn’t even acknowledge she was there.
The bartender passed the drink along the bar a moment later, and Tristan picked it up. Samantha couldn’t help but look up at him. He looked tired, maybe even more than herself. As if he’d raked his hands through his hair a hundred times, as if he’d walked a thousand miles, and right away she knew it was because of her. When she told him not to wait up, she’d meant it. She’d meant every word. But as the time went by, as her mind began to calm enough to process it all, she realized she’d been unfair.
What happened between them had happened when they were young. When she was a naive teenage girl, and he a boy too big for his britches. It was unfair to punish him for that now. To hold him captive for a crime he committed when he was eighteen.
Yet it surprised her how much the wound still stung. How learning that he still remembered was almost more painful than thinking he’d forgotten.
Tristan leaned back in his seat, still not acknowledging her, and began watching the Giants game on TV. She had no doubt he’d come to check on her, yet he hadn’t even said hello.
“My phone died,” she said as a way of breaking the ice. “It was in my pocket when I fell into the pool.”
Tristan nodded, but still didn’t look over. “I figured as much.”
She smoothed her loose hair behind ears, then took a small sip of her drink. The alcohol loosened her insides, but her outside was still hard and tense. “How did you find me?” she asked, both curious and apprehensive.
He looked up, meeting her eyes for the first time since he got there. “This is the fifth bar I’ve been to.”
She cringed, looking down toward her drink again. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”
He shrugged, his voice a deep and hollow. “Well you did.”
She placed her elbows on the bar and began rubbing slow circles at her temples with her fingers. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you, and I’m sorry, but it seems my whole world is falling in around me. You were just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
He turned in his seat, just a little, and took another sip of whiskey. “Do you want to talk about it?”
At first she shook her head, but then she thought better of it and nodded. Maybe it was the alcohol, or the fact that she felt so utterly alone, but she needed someone to talk to. Someone to care about all that she’d been through.
“You know,” she began. “Out of all the people I could imagine myself talking to about my problems with, it was never you.” She laughed. “No offense.”
He shrugged slightly before meeting her eyes. “None taken.” But his brows furrowed, and he nodded his head, indicating she should begin.
She tore the corner of her cocktail napkin, not knowing at all where to start. To confess about how Renee moving away had rocked her off her axis. Or the fact that seeing him after all these years made her question every minute of her six year long relationship? She decided to start with something a little less intimidating.
“I had a gallery opening last month,” she began. “One I’ve been planning for my entire life.” She glanced up, finding his expression attentive, his eyes boring into hers. “It was a total flop. I sold nothing at all.” She placed her feet on the rung of her stool, while trying to make sense of it all. “The thing is, people have been telling me my whole life that art wasn’t something people succeeded at. That I would struggle. That I wouldn’t make ends meet. But I was stubborn. So sure of myself until that moment—with my name in lights above my head, watching all those people pass by without stopping—That I realized how true it all was.”
She took a large gulp of her drink, hoping to push down the emotion that seemed to be climbing up her throat inch by inch. “The sad part is it took me this long to discover I’m wasting my time. To realize I’ve wasted so many years of my life on a stupid dream.”