Something about him calls to my body with primal, animalistic attraction. He makes me feel raw and primordial like no man ever has. I like nerdy, bookish Emily well enough, but around Cole, I turn into a fiend, desperate for him to corrupt me.
I bit him, for god’s sake!
“I’ve been avoiding him,” I update Makenna, who has been texting me non-stop for updates since I fessed up to falling off the wagon in less than two months. Six years of steely resolve, gone.
“Bitch move,” she counters as if I don’t know this.
“It’s awful. He just stares at me, all hard and dominating, with his stupid sexy smirk like he knows it’s inevitable, and he’s just biding his time.”
“Yeah, that sounds horrible.” I can feel Makenna’s eyes roll across the cell phone waves.
It’s a shitty, rainy weekend in Brussels, and I’m hiding from everyone under a huge pine tree. Mist and the occasional raindrop filters down onto me through the pine needles.
Everything about this weekend sucks.
“Stan is here making everyone miserable, he’s making everything worse,” I whine.
I hate it when I whine. I pride myself on not being a whiner, but that’s precisely what I am right now.
I need more coffee.
“What is that glob of snot doing there?”
“Irritating everyone, mostly. Running around pretending to be a big man in the paddock even though no one even knows who he is.”
Cole’s dad is, essentially, a failure. He wasn’t even a one-hit-wonder. He drove one professional race, which he lost, and then got canned. So he lives vicariously through Cole and has inflicted trauma, pressure, and abuse on him for years.
Nothing was ever good enough, no mistake ever went unnoticed or unpunished.
I hate him with every fiber of my being.
“Did he say anything to you? Do I need wine for this?”
“Isn’t it about 7:00 am there?”
“So?”
I wipe the mist off my forehead and pull the hood of my Imperium rain jacket up more. “Cole and Liam are trying to supervise him, but yeah, as soon as Cole got in the car, Stan started in on me. He told me I was ‘all grown up’ like a total creep.”
“Eww,” Makenna makes retching noises.
Stan has been a man-whore as long as I’ve known Cole. We tried to spend as little time as possible inside his house when we were together because, nine times out of ten, some half-naked new woman would be wandering around. Sometimes more than one.
I hate that he grew up like that and I hate that, over the years, I’ve wondered how much Cole inherited those traits from his dad. Cole’s been with a lot of women, there have always been photos and stories online.
I’m jealous, I know it. I have no right to judge Cole. But I don’t even know if he is still with the Russian tennis player he’s been linked to and here I’m kissing him on the streets of Budapest.
“Yeah, and then he said he hopes I’m actually helping his son this time and not distracting him from his goals,” I finish telling Makenna about my encounter with Stan.
“Oh, fuck him.”
“Right? He’s the one distracting everyone. Cole has been storming around all weekend slamming doors. Liam is pissed because Cole is pissed. Edmund is pissed because the whole team is on edge.”
I don’t even tell her that I’ve missed two calls from the Major General.
And, I feel like I’m making it all worse by continuing to run and hide from Cole like a baby. I just wish I had the answers. I need time to sit down and concentrate, to think this through, but I haven’t had a chance.
I can’t just ignore the fact that Cole left me, broke my heart—obliterated it.