With Every Heartbeat

“After...” I repeated slowly. “After what? After I met her, you mean?” I’d slept with her the very first night I’d met her.

Ten held up his hands in surrender, his eyes pleading. “I didn’t know you were going to start dating her. I swear to God. You’d just lost your virginity to the girl. I thought you’d call it good and move on to other pastures. She’s a one-time kind of slut, not someone you date. And she came on to me a couple nights after you guys first hooked up, so I thought, why the hell not? We were both unattached—or so I thought—and I was horny. When I heard the next day that you’d asked her out again, I cornered her and demanded to know why the fuck she’d done that to me. But she said she didn’t know you were going to call her again.”

I growled. “I didn’t call her again. I asked her out on an official date the morning after the very first night we met. And she said yes.”

Ten winced. “Then she lied to me. I promise you, Quinn, I would never betray you like that. I had no idea you were still interested in her after your first time.”

I couldn’t listen to any more. So I punched him.

In the face.

He wasn’t expecting it and shouted out his surprise before catching his jaw in his hands and cursing up a storm.

As he danced around the room to alleviate the pain, I pointed toward the door. “Get out of my apartment.”

Breathing hard, Ten straightened. He opened his mouth, but I shook my head, finished listening to him. “Just go.”

He drew in a deep breath, nodded, and left me alone. After he was gone, I took the beer he’d left on the coffee table and I got drunk. I was still drunk when a knock came on the front door.

I didn’t feel like talking to anyone or being civil, but I stood up and checked to see who it was anyway.

It was Zoey.

I knew he was drunk as soon as he opened the door. I covered my mouth as I stared up at him. “Oh, Quinn.”

While my eyes wanted to fill with tears, his eyes remained dry. And hard and accusing. “Did you know?”

“What?” Pain sluiced through me. I shook my head fiercely. “No! How can you even ask that? You know...you know I had no idea. You know I...I never would’ve helped you with the ring, or...or...oh God. She betrayed me too. I’m supposed to be her friend, her closest confidante, and she kept something like this from me. I’m...I had no idea.”

With a relenting nod, he stepped back and let the door fall open. “Well, this seems to be the party for the betrayed. Come on in.”

I stepped over the threshold, smelling the alcohol immediately. When I spotted the half-empty bottle sitting open on the coffee table, I started for it. “We need to cut you off.”

But Quinn caught my arm and whirled me to face him. I gasped when my chest bumped into his. “How ’bout we don’t,” he said softly.

I gulped and lifted my gaze. He stepped in toward me, and I backed up a pace. As if my retreat irritated him, he turned me and pressed my back to the wall.

“Quinn?” I said, my voice small. My skin buzzed with apprehension. His expression looked so severe. I had no idea what he was thinking, and that scared me. I wasn’t afraid of him exactly, but I was definitely afraid of the moment. Anything could happen, but what I feared most was what I’d let happen.

A relieved breath rushed from me when he released my arm. But the small moment of freedom didn’t last. He slid the back of his finger up my bicep toward my shoulder, making me suck in a shaky inhale.

“It’s funny what you remember when you’re drunk, you know.” His gaze seemed fixated on the place he touched me. “Like I was just sitting here, remembering the last time I drank. Do you remember that night, Zoey? Do you remember what we almost did?”

He cupped my cheek with one palm while he pressed his other hand against the wall beside my face, so close that his wrist brushed my hair. I gulped and tried to soak deeper into the sheetrock. But he was still right there, invading all my senses.

“Do you?” he pressed.

I closed my eyes. “Yes,” I whispered, because in that moment I didn’t know how to lie to him.

He let out a harsh breath. “Why didn’t I remember that until now? I almost had my mouth on you but I stopped because I wanted to be faithful to my girlfriend. What a joke. Faithful? She doesn’t even know the meaning of the word.”

“Quinn,” I started, but he took his other hand off my cheek to set it on the wall too, neatly trapping me into place.

“Do you think I’m a joke, Zoey?”