It was his girlfriend, wasn’t it? The owner of the black Ferrari.
Why else would he look furious, almost desperate, to get me the hell out of there? As if he didn’t want whoever was there to see me.
As if I was some dirty little secret he wanted to hide.
My heart hurt.
Leave! He’d said it so quietly at first, then with more force as if he couldn’t stand being around me anymore. I’m done with you.
His cold and impersonal tone was as shocking as a slap in the face. I curled my hands into fists, wishing I could punch something. His nose preferably, just to see him bleed.
The way he was making me bleed now.
I was a game.
That was all I was to him, wasn’t I?
Was this his revenge because of what I did last night when I splashed the puddle on him with my car? Or maybe it was because of the whole motorcycle incident. Maybe he was really that furious about it.
But was he really that small and heartless to make me believe that he was genuinely interested in me when all this time he was just stringing me along?
He was good. Fuck, he was good. Oscar-fucking-worthy good.
Because…I was starting to believe him. I thought he was different. I had thrown him almost every rude behavior in my book to push him away, but he just kept coming back. And I thought…I thought…
Tears threatened to flow, but I held them off.
I had mistaken his tenacity for sincerity.
He’d told me he liked me. Twice. I remembered each moment.
The first one was when he showed up in my shop and followed me inside my home. I like you, he’d said with that dangerous, amused smile. Those lying lips.
I didn’t believe him then, thinking he probably said that to all the girls he wanted to bone. I should’ve kept on not believing him.
But then tonight happened. And he’d melted my resolve.
I hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep in weeks.
I was so exhausted and feeling so vulnerable and alone. And when he and I walked from the gym to my car and I saw the time, I realized what he’d done for me.
I had fallen asleep while waiting for him in the gym. And he had waited for me.
He must have been tired and hungry after practice, but he didn’t wake me up or complain.
And it struck a chord inside me. I felt like he cared.
And so I opened up to him.
I like you, he’d said again. And I believed him.
I felt that he was serious. That somehow, I was more than a little special to him. I thought I felt his sincerity. But I realized now that I just wanted to believe it.
A huge part of it was my fault. And that made me angrier more than anything else.
Because I should have known better.
I fell for his act. I was weak, and I prided myself on being strong. It was a blow. If I wasn’t strong, then what was I?