Pretty When She Cries - Black Mountain Academy

“You can’t sit out here all night.” I sigh. He’s totally playing on my empathy now.

“So let me come in.” His lips are tilted into a half-smile. Half hopeful, half weary.

I hesitate, but I’m too cold to overthink this right now. Maybe if he comes in, I can finally get my point across.

“Okay.”

Landon blinks like he wasn’t expecting my agreement, but the moment I have the door open, he follows me in before I can change my mind. He looks around the place as though he missed it, but then his attention moves to me. It’s impossible not to notice the redness around the edges of his eyelids. I’ve never known Landon to have allergies, so it doesn’t make sense. Has he been crying?

Everything else disappears in the face of this realization, and I think I should have been smarter. I should have just let us freeze to death outside because now I can smell him, and it’s so good I just want to inhale him like a drug. I want to hold him and promise it will all be okay, even if it’s not true.

“I’ve missed you so fucking much,” he rasps.

He takes a cautious step toward me, and internally, warning bells scream at me to push him away. But I can’t, and I don’t. When his fingers brush over my jaw, my eyes flutter shut, and my heart revives from its dead sleep. He drags me to him, wrapping me in his arms as his lips brush over my temple.

For a second, I allow myself to lean into him. He breathes me in. He tangles his fingers in my hair. My lungs pant, and I blurt out the only thing I know to make this stop before he destroys me all over again.

“I know what you did.”

He freezes, slowly pulling back to meet my eyes. “What I did?”

I extricate myself from his body to recalibrate. But cold-hearted bitch is no longer available in my default settings, so I opt for rational. As it turns out, even my rational side is too emotional because when I try to speak, my lip wobbles.

“You went to Audrey. You… had sex with her.”

His eyebrow shoots up like the idea amuses him, and it pisses me off.

“This isn’t funny, Landon.” I pace away a few steps and drag my hands through my hair in frustration. “We had just been together for the first time, and that meant something to me. But as soon as things got hard, you ran to her.”

“Kail—”

He tries to take a step toward me, but I back away. We need distance for this conversation. It’s the only way it can work.

“You can deny it if you want,” I say. “But I was at your house that night. I was waiting for you in your bedroom, so I heard everything. There’s no point in lying.”

Landon studies me for a few moments. His brows furrow like something is clicking into place. But he doesn’t look repentant as he fishes his phone out of his pocket and taps the screen.

“The twenty-seventh, right?”

I shift uncomfortably, somewhat surprised he even remembers the date. To me, it was important, but I didn’t think he’d be able to rattle it off so easily. When he looks up at me in question, I reply with a jerk of my chin, which is all I can manage.

He taps his phone a few more times and then glances at me again. “So, just to be clear… you think I came here, slept with you, picked a fight, and then ran off to do the same thing with Audrey a couple of hours later?”

Well, it sounds pretty dumb when he says it like that. But I know what I heard, and I won’t let him convince me otherwise.

“Yes,” I answer defiantly.

“Okay, let’s test that theory.” He walks over to the gray lounger and parks himself on it, slapping his palm down on the space next to him. “Come on. I won’t bite.”

I wait a few seconds just to be stubborn, but I am curious about what he wants to show me. I don’t know how he thinks he’s going to prove anything.

When I sit down beside him, I leave a gap of a few inches, which Landon swallows when he leans into me. He holds his phone up so both of us can see it.

“This is my security app,” he explains. “See the date?”

“Yes…” I answer slowly.

He hits the play button, and on the screen, there’s a video recording of the people who were there that night. A handful of guys from the football team, a couple of random girls, and Audrey. They are all gathered in Landon’s sitting area. When he unmutes the footage, I can hear him ragging on them about the weed. He speeds up the video a bit, and most of the group breaks off, filtering outside. Landon goes with them.