Page 120 of Down Shift (Driven 8)
And so I paint through the tears. Big gulping sobs that splash off my face and onto the railing, where I have to repaint what it washes away. It’s sloppy and messy and as much as I’m going to hate myself in the morning for this, right now it’s what I need to do.
When I cover it all and then some—with huge drip marks included—I collapse on the steps, drop the paintbrush, and just cry: elbows on my knees, head in my hands, feel-sorry-for-myself, want-to-kick-him-in-the-balls tears.
The headlights startle me. I’m not sure how much time I’ve spent staring into space. How many times have the tears started and stopped? Probably just as many times I’ve cursed him out for being cruel and chastised myself for being just what my father said I was, gullible. But when the headlights pull down the street and the car door slams shut, I don’t think I have the effort to fight him.
Until I hear him call my name.
“Getty!” Full of worry. Fear. Confusion.
“No!” I’m on my feet in an instant, back to the wall, heart on lockdown. “You don’t get to come here anymore. LEAVE!”
“What the fuck is going on, Getty? Why the hell did you paint that pink? Why is Liam calling me chewing me out? Why aren’t you answering your goddamn phone? What the hell is he talking about a picture for?” His voice echoes around the empty street as it escalates in pitch with each and every word. His face is the perfect picture of panic in the waning daylight and I have to begrudgingly admire what a great actor he is. How he made me feel and believe when he had no intention of following through on anything he ever said to me.
“Go away, Zander. Go away and don’t ever come back.” This time when I speak, my voice is quiet but livid. “You said friends with benefits would end in disaster; well, thanks to you, it did.”
“Will you please tell me what in the fuck is going on here?” He goes to grab my arms and I jerk back as fast as I can. So much so, his eyes grow wide, my response telling him I’m dead serious.
“Was it funny to you to call me, tell me you want to try at something more between you and me, us, and then turn around and fuck the girl in your bed?”
“Getty. What? What are you— Talk to me. Please.” He runs his hand through his hair. It stands atop his head as his eyes beg me for answers that he already damn well knows from firsthand knowledge.
I stomp in the house and pick up my phone on the counter. It’s easier to show him than meet his eyes and hear his pleading. The screen is covered in notifications from him, but I don’t even read them. Don’t have the time to care. As the wood floor creaks to tell me he’s followed me inside, I open the Instagram app and shove the screen out to his face.
His eyes widen farther. Lips pull tight. Panic passes over his features as his eyes flicker from the picture back to mine several times as he figures out what to say. How to get out of being caught.
“You want to know what the fuck’s going on?” I scream. “That’s what’s going on. You. Screwing. Her.”
He stumbles back and sits on the arm of the couch. “No, Getty. No. That’s not me.”
“Not YOU?” My voice cracks from the emotion, from the tears, from the hurt that’s eating my soul alive right now. “Yes, Zander, yes. It is you. How can you say otherwise? The bruised thumbnail. The goddamn shirt from the bar. She. Has it. On! You’re naked. At the Four Seasons. It all looks pretty fricking obvious to me.”
“No. It’s—”
“Thanks for proving me right. That all men are exactly like Ethan. Even when I believed you weren’t. The difference is what you did was ten times more cruel.” My sob hitches and I reach my hands out to keep him away from me. “Don’t touch me.”
“Fucking Christ, Getty.”
I scamper back against the counter as he paces the room. Even lost in my own emotion, I can sense the turmoil that radiates off him and
fills the kitchen. “She was there last night. At the club. At the fucking suite when the guys brought the party back.”
I jump as his fist tears through the drywall. His own yelp of pain echoing right after it. Looks like despite the pain, he’s going to do it again. But all I can focus on is that he knows who this woman was. He’s admitting that she was there with him.
“She tried to hook up with me. I remember that. She tried and I told her no thanks. And then I went to bed. God, I was so fucking drunk that I don’t remember anything much after that. The door to my room opening. The noise and light of the party in the suite. Then closing. I don’t know.” When he looks up to me, if I had thought my heart was broken before, I might have been mistaken, because it’s definitely broken now. Zander’s face is wrought with apology. His body tense but defeated. Everything about him screams guilty right now when all I want him to do is give me a definitive answer.
And he doesn’t. Seems he can’t.
He just stands there with puppy dog eyes in a conflicted blue and mouth lax as he tries to remember the one thing he can to right our world.
“Please tell me you’d know whether you slept with her or not.” Tears slowly slide down my face because for some reason this seems so much harder to comprehend. Blatantly doing it is one thing. Knowing it ahead of time. Purposefully disregarding me.
But to sleep with someone, ruin what I thought we had, and it was so nonmonumental that he doesn’t remember it at all? That his disrespect of me was so great that he’d ruin us for nothing?
I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I can’t stand still. And I can’t move. So I just stare at him with wide eyes and a heart that hurts so damn bad because I’m so in love with him right now and hate him all at the same time.
How did I let this happen? Again?
I’ve been cheated on. My husband had slept with countless women while telling me that I wasn’t good enough. And now I’m looking at a man who was telling me I was good enough and he’s gone and done the same thing? What does that say about me? That he was just telling me these things but that I wasn’t satisfying him regardless?
