Wilder

“I don’t care,” I lied. That would be quite possibly the most embarrassing thing he could do, not to mention that he’d wind up on-camera, my heartbreak fodder for a worldwide audience.

“You’re lying.”

Fuck.

I reached out and unlocked the door, turning the handle enough for him to push it open. Then I sucked in a breath and tried to find the willpower that had kept me clinging to a canyon wall two years ago, the strength I’d had to finally let go and save my own life a few weeks ago.

I walked into my living room, knowing that he’d follow. Then I pulled out the bottle of vodka Penna left in our freezer and downed a shot, hoping it was cold enough and high enough proof to numb the bleeding edges of my soul.

Then I turned around, my breath sucking in at the battered lines of Paxton’s face. “Are you okay?” I asked, hating how beautiful he was, even with the purple shading of his cheekbone and the cuts on his face.

He touched the swollen, discolored cheek. “Yeah. Doc already checked me out. Nothing is broken, just bruised and a little cut up.”

“Is it true? Rachel? All of it?” I spit out with my usual verbal grace.

He ran his tongue over his abused lip and looked away. “Yeah.”

I tried to ignore the way the tiny shred of hope inside me screamed out in agony as it died. “Everything you did…my scholarship, my tutoring assignment, this suite down the hall from yours…was that just to get Rachel on board?”

“Yes,” he whispered, a tortured look in his eyes that had no right to be there.

“Rachel was your endgame,” I said, remembering the words on the picture.

“At one time, yes, but not anymore. I promise,” he said, reaching for me.

I sidestepped him, putting the couch between us. “Explain,” I ordered, my voice as flat as my spirit.

“Everything I did at the start was to get Rachel here, yes. Everything you listed, and more.”

“Asshole.” What more could there possibly be?

“You always knew I was,” he countered before ripping his hands through his hair. “God, this is not going how I had planned.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Please, do tell me what you had planned.” Was it breaking my heart? Playing with me until you could have her?

“Yes, I used you to get to Rachel, but it wasn’t for me, I swear.”

I laughed, the sound evil to my own ears. “Really.”

“Really.”

My nails bit into my palms at the use of what I had begun to think was our word. How junior-high immature was I? How blind had I been? “You’re just kissing her in that picture, that’s all.”

“First, I have no clue how that picture got here. I haven’t seen it since I ripped Landon’s face out of it two years ago and shoved it in a box. Whoever put it there obviously knows where I keep private shit at my house, and apparently how to get into my fire box here.”

“Landon?” What the hell?

“Yeah. Landon. He was the one who fell for my girlfriend, who was sleeping with her while I was trying to be respectful and keep it in my pants.”

“Landon?” I repeated, trying to let it sink in. “I thought it was Nick.”

“Nick? He would never do that. He loved Brooke so much I figured they’d have three kids by now. It was Landon. I wrote the endgame comment on the picture before I showed it to him, because he was on the side, looking like a love-struck puppy. That’s when the pieces started to click and I figured it out. No guy looks at his best friend’s girl like that. That’s when he came clean and told me they’d been together since the spring. Then he started spouting the ‘we never meant to hurt you’ and ‘we didn’t want to break up the team, but we’re in love’ crap.” His laugh came out self-deprecating and sarcastic. “How in love are you if you’re still making out with your boyfriend and getting a side piece? If that’s love, I want no part of it.”

“Okay,” I said, mostly to fill the space, not knowing what the hell to say to that kind of comment. He wanted no part of my love? Or any love? “And the endgame comment?”

“I told him to remember our endgame, which had always been the Renegades, to remember what we were working so hard for—what he was screwing up. And then I made one of the worst decisions in my life, and I gave him an ultimatum. It was her or us.”

“You didn’t fight for her?” I asked. Was he going to fight for me? Did I even want him to?

“I didn’t love her. I thought I did at the time, but now I know better. At first, he chose her. He left the Renegades, and I ripped him out of the picture and shoved it into a box under my bed to remind me that this was what love does, it destroys everything around you, makes you give up the people you care about most because of some temporary, hormonal surge that inevitably wanes with time. At least…that’s what I thought then. Watching them leave—the betrayal I felt—that was all from Landon. Sure, Rachel hurt me, but Landon wrecked me, destroyed everything I depended on.”

“You wanted him to prove his loyalty, and he failed,” I guessed, remembering how he’d told me that was the one quality he had to have in a friend.

Paxton nodded. “He couldn’t live without the team, and a month later begged me to reconsider, but I was too pissed and too immature to see the bigger picture. So my ego won, and he lost the only woman he’s ever loved. It’s something that I’ve paid for since that day, watching him fuck every girl we come in contact with and connect with no one, watching that light in him die. I did that.”