First and Tension (Summersweet Island 4)

He begged me to trust him, but he can’t give me the same thing in return.

“Quinn!” Marcus shouts from where he moved to the other side of the table, his voice making Quinn look away from me to find his teammate holding his phone up in the air. “Jeanie’s on the phone, looking for you, man.”

Quinn stares at him silently for a few seconds, then gives him a nod before looking back at me, still not moving closer to me, nothing but anger shooting out of his eyes now.

“I have to take care of this…” He trails off, running one of his hands through his hair in obvious frustration. “I just… I can only deal with one problem at a time right now. I need to talk to her and deal with this first.”

I ruined everything… and now I’m a problem he has to deal with and take care of.

“It’s fine; you need to talk to her,” I reassure him with a smile that takes everything in me to put on my face, the cheerleader inside me who can shine through the pain gasping with her last breath.

Without another word, Quinn stalks away from me and over to the phone Marcus holds out for him.

While everything inside me dies.

Everything.

It withers and dies, and I don’t even feel a thing. Every part of me is numb from my head to my feet. I can’t feel my too tight ponytail that started giving me a headache an hour ago, or the underwire in my bra digging into me, or the button of my jeans biting into my stomach after too many nachos at the stadium, or my toes being pinched from standing around in heels for hours.

I stand here watching Quinn walk away from me, the problem he has to deal with, and I feel… nothing.

CHAPTER 25

Quinn

“That’s not good enough for me.”

Three goddamn seconds.

That’s all it took for me to fuck everything up last night, just like Tyler—that piece of shit—told me I would at the charity event a month ago. He lied to my face about everything else, but he sure as shit knew what he was talking about when he said those words to me, didn’t he?

Three fucking seconds of doubt, letting all my past insecurities and Tyler’s bullshit flash through my mind and show all over my face, before I realized I was being an idiot and Emily would never do something so cold and callous.

And then I was just pissed.

Pissed Tyler had screwed us over, pissed that Ellen Westwood was a vindictive bitch, pissed that once again Emily’s name was being dragged through the mud all over social media, and pissed that she was offered the job of her dreams and didn’t even get the chance to tell me herself. I was so fucking proud of her, and so angry that her moment was ruined. I made her stop talking about it, because it felt wrong doing it in front of everyone, especially that narcissistic asshole Tyler. That kind of news is something that should have been celebrated, and screamed about, and rejoiced over with nakedness and orgasms. I didn’t want to hear one more word out of that beautiful mouth of hers until she could say it happily and without the cloud of doom Tyler had brought into the restaurant, ruining everything with his greed.

After everything that happened last night, if I could go back in time, those three seconds of doubt after Tyler was dragged from the room are the only things I’d change, and the fact that she saw it, and she knew. She knew that for those couple of seconds in time, I didn’t believe in her. I asked Emily to trust me. I fucking begged her to trust me, and at the first sign of trouble, all I could think about was every other woman who used me to get something she wanted, instead of the smart, beautiful, intelligent, light of my goddamn life that stood right in front of me.

“You look like shit.”

Lifting my head from my hands, with my elbows resting on my bent knees, I lean my back against the siding of the Sandbar Cottages rental office, where I’ve been sitting on the floor of the front porch since before the sun came up.

“Thanks. I feel like shit too,” I reply to Wren as I push myself up from the floor, brushing sand off the seat of my pants that’s been tracked up onto the porch from people’s feet, including mine, when I trudged up here in the dark a few hours ago.

Pulling a set of keys out of her back pocket, Wren unlocks the office door, glancing back at me with a shake of her head. Taking pity on me, she lets out a huge sigh, pushing open the door and leaving it open for me to follow. Walking inside, I gently close it behind me as she flips a switch on the wall, filling the room with light.