Rogen smirked at her. She took a break from slicing and sipped her wine. Preparing herself to jump from yet another high cliff.
She said, “When I visited you at Trinity … I had a specific reason for being there.”
“Seeing me wasn’t enough?” He tried to jest; she could tell. But his rugged features were set in stone.
“Always,” she admitted. “But some things had changed and I needed to tell you about them.”
“What changed?”
She swallowed down a little more wine. This was about to get prickly.
Jewel scraped the garlic into a small bowl and began chopping red and green bell peppers. She said, “I went to see you at Trinity because I wanted you to know Vin and I had started dating. Secretly—we really didn’t want your parents to know, since he was living under their roof at that point. And … I was falling for him. I wanted you to hear that from me.”
She paused. Glanced up.
Rogen stared at her, his expression difficult to read. Not exactly shocked, yet still stunned. A look she couldn’t quite reconcile.
The betrayal in his tone, however, said it all. “Falling in love?”
Her stomach instantly became a tangled mess. “Yes.”
She chopped some more, concentrating on not lopping off a finger, while he digested her words. Then she gazed at him again and said, “It happened sort of out of the blue. I mean, we spent all of our time together, yes. But we didn’t plan it, Rogen. We didn’t talk about it even as we were growing closer. The relationship just … evolved.”
Oh, shit. Was that the right word? Evolved?
No.
Because she and Vin hadn’t morphed from friends to lovers. They’d literally been thrust into it. Like a switch had been thrown. One day they were trying to wade through Rogen being gone and Vin’s parents dying and Jewel was just waiting, waiting, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Then they’d been discussing Bayli and Jonathan plotting out their let’s finally do it! date, and Vin had challenged Jewel about positions and tempted her with his extensive knowledge and … well … when he’d kissed her down by the river, she’d been out of her mind with wanting him.
That clawing sensation—that was the first time she’d experienced it.
She’d broken the kiss. Their eyes had locked. And Vin had known. He’d known exactly what to do to her. Things Rogen never had.
Honestly, Vin possessed a skill set to boggle a girl’s mind.
The brooding had been something a little more complex to deal with, yet Jewel had somehow convinced herself that she understood Vin in a way no one else could, particularly following the harrowing deaths of his parents. And maybe it’d been true. For a while.
In a tight voice, Rogen said, “So you went to New York to tell me you were fucking my best friend.”
He deserved to be pissy.
She calmly—so she hoped—repeated, “No, I went to tell you I was falling in love with him. Vin and I had both agreed to go to San Francisco State together. He had yet to tell you he wasn’t going to Yale with you. It felt as though we actually had a future, Vin and I. Whereas with you … well, you had internships in Italy and college on the opposite coast, and come on, Rogen. That whole star-crossed-lovers thing … At some point, you have to admit that we’re on completely different trajectories.”
Which had broken her heart wide open. Vin had helped to heal it.
Look how that turned out.
Karma, like nostalgia, could also be a bit of a bitch sometimes.
Rogen asked, “So, what—you and Vin were fated?”
She felt his agitation across the five feet separating them. “Clearly not.”
“Jewel.” He reached for the Saran to wrap the dough but then just stared at her. “The three of us haven’t hung out as a group since we were sixteen. Okay, yeah, I doubt anything was going on between the two of you then—”
“Nothing was going on then, Rogen,” she assured him. “When you and I were actually together, that was it. Just us.”