SEXT

I want to. So badly. I want to just give in, quit asking all these questions, trust him. But that’s so hard to do. Especially after everything that’s happened. Everything I’ve seen.

I shake my head. “Okay, so you made a whole profile just to stalk me. Great. That’s a real point in your favor.”

“It wasn’t to stalk you, Clove, it was just to start a conversation. If you hadn’t been interested, I would’ve dropped things right away. But you answered, you struck up a conversation with me. It went both ways.”

“Right. And how special was it really? More entertaining than the other dozen conversations you have going on right now?” I roll my eyes and hand the phone back to him.

“What, these?” He laughs, a scoff in the back of his throat. “I haven’t checked this profile in weeks. Especially not since I met you.”

“Then why do you have so many unread messages?” I point out, rolling my eyes. Now I do lean past him to jab the first floor button.

He’s faster though, and double-taps it to unselect the floor, leaving us suspended in midair once more. “Clove, look.” He opens his message section and points me at it. “See these last read messages? They’re from weeks ago, some of them months.”

I stare at the inbox, my brow furrowing. “That can’t be right.”

Now it’s his turn to scowl. “What, I can’t possibly be telling you the truth?”

“What happened to all the conversations with the other women?” I counter, crossing my arms.

“Other… What? Clove, there are no other women. There haven’t been since we met.”

“That’s not what I saw.”

“Saw where?” His frown has deepened even further, though I don’t think it’s directed at me. He looks a million miles away now, thinking hard.

To bring him back to reality, I pull my phone out of my pocket. Now it’s my turn to open my app and pull up the messages that came in yesterday. I flip the screen around, hold it out for him to see. At least today the incoming calls and spamming sext-messages from total strangers have calmed down enough that I can safely use it. Enough to show him this, at any rate.

He reads. With every line he reads, his eyebrows rise higher, and his jaw clenches. By the time he reaches the end of the messages, he looks furious, angrier than I’ve ever seen him. His fists are clenched at his sides, and his whole body trembles from the force of his fury.

“How fucking dare she.”

I swallow again. Against my better judgment, against all of my instincts, I believe that anger. He can’t be this good of an actor, no way. “Your ex?” I ask, a hesitant tremor in my voice.

He clenches my phone so tight in one fist that I’m almost afraid the screen will shatter. “How did she even…”

I gently pry my phone from his fingers, mostly to save its life. “Did she make up those conversations? Because some of them…” I pull open the one where he’s talking to another girl. Trouble sleeping? “Seem awfully familiar.” I lift one pointed eyebrow.

Zayne grimaces. “Some of them are real. Probably most of them, I don’t remember. But the dates are all wrong. Look.” He scrolls through his phone. It takes him a while, but he eventually locates one of the conversations, the one with CandyCane. Sure enough, it took place almost two years ago. Same with another one, shortly afterward, with XtraSaucy. In fact, almost all of the conversations are from that time period. The screenshots are real, identical to his account message history. All except for the dates which had been carefully, meticulously altered.

“It’s all the people I was messaging right after she and I broke up,” he finally says, his tone heavy. “Right when I first moved in here…” He winces at one particularly sexy conversation. “Some of these are embarrassing.”

“Not as embarrassed as I am,” I mutter, wincing.

“No, Clove. You couldn’t have known.” He wraps an arm around me, and finally, after what feels like holding my breath for 24 hours, I sink into his embrace once more. It scares me, how much I crave this. How desperately I wanted him to touch me, even when I thought he’d been betraying me, screwing me around. I still wanted him, even when I knew I’d have to walk away.

That scares the shit out of me.

“The screenshots were so realistic…”

“I’d have thought the same thing as you,” Zayne admits with a clenched jaw. “I’m so sorry that you have to go through this mess. You don’t deserve this kind of drama. If you want to walk away now, to spare yourself, I will completely understand.”

“Hell no.” I wrap my arms around him too, and lean into his warm embrace. “You don’t deserve this kind of drama either, Zayne. I mean, how did she even get those conversations?”