The night at the Hamptons, when I had given myself to him.
I choked on a sob as a few tears slipped down my cheeks. I swiped at the liquid emotion, telling myself I could do this. I could get through this flight.
A man across the aisle glanced in my direction, his head tilted to the side in concern.
Oh, God, don’t look at me like that! I wanted to scream at him. I did not want pity. I couldn’t handle someone recognizing that I was falling to pieces. That would for sure make it impossible to hold this in until I was somewhere private.
Long, slow breaths were inhaled through my nose and exhaled from my lungs. I stared down at a nonexistent piece of lint on my pants, plucking at the material just because it was something to do, something else to focus on besides my heart falling out of my chest.
More memories drowned me.
Last night, with each kiss, each touch, each soft caress, he had silently been asking me to fall the rest of the way with him. And I had. I had followed his lead, and on the way down, he had made love to me until my heart was beating like he’d wanted it to. Like I’d wanted it to. My world had changed. Inside, my walls had fallen down and he was all around me. All I knew. All I wanted to know.
Kline had gone from being my boss to my best friend, my lover, and my intoxication until he let the needle break off in my skin. This wasn’t a little cut that would scab over and flake off. No. He had cut me so deep I hadn’t even bled.
The pain was so unbearable that all my emotions fled the scene. I switched from distraught—fighting the sob threatening to bubble up from my lungs—to robotic.
I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to ask him why, after the night we had shared together, he would still want to meet someone who wasn’t me. Initially, when I’d found out Kline was Ruck, and he had been chatting with TAPRoseNEXT without knowing it was me, it didn’t upset me. I looked at the entire situation with a rational, understanding head. Because I had done the same thing.
But the second I had met Thatch, the guy whose picture was on Bad_Ruck’s TapNext profile, I’d known I needed to stop. I knew I wanted Kline. I knew I was falling in love with him, and I didn’t want anything to ruin that. Which was why I had told Cassie to take the reins. Who would’ve thought that the whole time I was chatting with Ruck, I was actually talking to Kline?
It was the ultimate mindfuck.
Unfortunately for me, that mindfuck had just gotten a whole lot worse.
This was different from a simple response to another woman on an online dating profile. He was requesting to meet someone that wasn’t me, someone he knew was my best friend.
What on earth did he think he was going to gain from that? Was he planning on being in a relationship with me while screwing Cassie on the side?
God, it didn’t add up, didn’t seem like the Kline I knew, but the proof was right in front of my face.
I felt so devastated. Knowing what we shared and all of the possibilities of what we could have been, why would Kline have risked that? In a matter of a few sentences, he had just ruined everything. Destroyed us. Destroyed me.
I felt sick. Nausea coiled my stomach, constant and unrelenting.
The minute the seatbelt lights went off, I made a beeline for the lavatory. My breakfast filled the small metal toilet within seconds. It took a good five minutes before I could stop dry heaving. I held myself up over the sink, staring at a woman I didn’t even recognize. I did my best to clean up, splashing cool water on my face and rinsing my mouth out, before I made my way back to my seat.
God, I had never felt so cold, so fucking alone.
I didn’t want to feel like this. I wanted the pilot to turn the plane around so I could talk to Kline. I wanted to forget that TapNext conversation had ever happened.
But I wasn’t going to be that woman who couldn’t step back and face the facts.
Even though it was going to kill me, I was going to be the woman who knew when to end things. The woman who could end a relationship with a man—even though she loved him—because she knew she didn’t deserve to be treated like that.
He had told me he loved me, he had touched me and kissed me in ways a man would only do when he was in love. But while he had been doing that, he had also found time to request to meet another woman. These were not the actions of a man I wanted to be in a relationship with.
For the entire five-and-half-hour flight, my mind raced. Every memory was a picture in my head, his betrayal scratching across the surface of each photograph and tainting it forever.
I was fucking miserable, stuck on an old airplane with no Wi-Fi after finding out the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with was going behind my back and requesting to meet other women on the side.