“A picture speaks a thousand words,” I said flatly.
“Yeah, and not a single one of them is true.” Radleigh stepped into the living room but as he approached me, I took a few steps back.
“Don’t. I don’t want you anywhere near me right now.”
“Okay. Then just listen.”
I gave a single nod, trying to keep a grip of the fury that bubbled around my blood stream. I didn’t want to listen. I didn’t want to hear. I just wanted pretend none of this had happened. That she hadn’t bulldozed her way into our lives and thrown everything into disarray. The stupidity of it all. Just days ago we’d stood in this exact same room arguing about Jen, and right when he should have been coming home, we were doing the same thing all over again.
Radleigh’s feet shuffled awkwardly before he began. “She kissed me. I didn’t even… I didn’t see it coming. She’d been kind of nervous about me meeting Jayden, and when I drove her and the kids back to the hotel, she just… she hugged me. And forgive me, but it had been pretty fucking scary for me too, so yeah, I hugged her back. But then she lunged at me, and she kissed me, and I did push her away, Leah. I know you can’t tell that from the photo, but the press are assholes. Me pushing her away would have made a much less interesting story than the bullshit they actually published.”
“When?” I asked coldly. “When did you push her away? After how long?”
“It was only seconds. The moment I realised what was happening, I shoved her away from me and left. She’s been calling me ever since, but the only thing I’ve done is send her a message to tell her to back off. I haven’t had any other contact with her, and I won’t until everything has been straightened out with you.”
“Straightened out.” I gave a bitter laugh and turned away from him, pushing my hands through my hair. “It’s going to take more than an apology to fix this, Radleigh. The sad thing is, you don’t seem to understand that.”
“Look, I’ve already spoken to Annie and she’s working to get this cleared up, get the photos removed, and get retractions and apologies posted on the websites that published this trash. It’ll all be gone within a few hours.”
“Nothing that’s online ever goes away anymore.” I spun back to face him. “Screenshots of that photo, of you kissing her, it’ll be posted on social media and everyone will see it.”
“So I’ll call everyone who needs to know the truth and tell them. I’ll tell them what happened and it’ll be okay.”
“And the rest of the world?”
He shrugged. “Who cares about them? This is about us. You and me. As long as we know the truth, that’s what matters.”
As I looked at the man who was slowly slipping away from me, I saw regret in his eyes. I saw the love he felt for me, and the fear that he might lose me. Might lose everything. And I saw it because it was reflected in my own eyes. His every fear was mine too.
But his fears weren’t exactly the same as mine. Not really. Seeing his love for me was the very thing that made every part of me hurt. Because it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough for him to be honest with me or himself. I was fully aware I’d been riddled with paranoia, and that maybe I was seeing things that weren’t really there, but deep down in the very core of me, I knew. He might not have invited that kiss, and he never would have made a move on her, but buried somewhere inside him was the question of how things might have been between them.
Radleigh’s eyes met mine, and it was as if he’d heard every thought inside my head. “Don’t ask me to leave. Please.”
“I’m not going to ask you to leave. I’m going to ask you to tell me what you want. And if you don’t know, then you should go until you do know.”
“I want you, Leah.”
“And yet you still let her kiss you.”
“I didn’t let her. She kissed me and I stopped her.”
“Radleigh, let me ask you this. You met her at noon, right? Went out and had lunch then drove her back to the hotel.” He nodded. “So, you got to the hotel at say, two o’clock, maybe a little later?” He nodded again. “It’s four thirty now.”
“What’s your point?”
“I called you last night to tell you I was going out. And I text you last night to tell you Bryce was staying here, so that when the newspapers made a big deal out of it, you wouldn’t be surprised. And I did that even though both of us know perfectly well that nothing would ever have happened between me and Bryce. But you? You have hidden things from me over and over. And this? If this was really nothing? You would have warned me. You should have warned me. Instead, you let me find out in the worst way possible, but my guess is that you were hoping I wouldn’t find out at all. That nobody saw anything, and that you could hide it from me.”
“I would have told you.”
“Well, you’ll have to forgive me for not believing you based on your recent track record for honesty.”
Radleigh sped across the room and grabbed me by the shoulders, forcing me to look at him. “You’re not doing this. You’re not going to throw away everything we have over something that didn’t mean anything.”
I shook my head as his blazing eyes burned in to mine. “I’m not. That’s not what I’m doing. I love you, Radleigh. But right now, I don’t trust you. And if I pretend that’s okay with me, it’s going to eat away at me, and we’re going to fight, and I’m going to drive you right back to her.”
“Don’t you get it?” He shook me, not too forcefully, but enough to make his point. “I am never going back to her. I don’t want her. I don’t care about her.”
Closing my eyes, I sighed before slowly opening them again and looking up at him. “If you can tell me there wasn’t even a small part of you that was curious, that didn’t remember how you felt about her and that you didn’t want to kiss her back, if only for a second, I’ll stop talking, you can go get Jessica, and we’ll live happily ever after.”