“I don’t remember,” he says after a pause. His frown deepens. “Sarah? Emily? I have no idea.”
I bark out a laugh at that, because those names aren’t even remotely similar. “You don’t remember.”
“Swear to god, Rosebud.”
Letting my head fall back, I bang it against my headboard. “I’m such an idiot.”
“Maybe a little,” he teases, that frown melting into a smile for a moment before his face falls again. “I was planning to tell you how I felt about you. That first night, I was going to take you to the beach with a picnic and a stolen bottle of wine from my dad’s collection, and I was going to ask you to be my girlfriend.”
My breath gets caught in my throat.
“I’d wanted to ask you since I was sixteen, but some part of me knew I’d be likely to screw it up if I asked you too soon. Even asking you before we were about to go to colleges hours away from each other was risky, but I couldn’t imagine going another year without being able to call you mine.” There’s a nostalgic twinkle in his eyes, but it’s quickly dulled by the reality of what happened that summer. “And then you disappeared.”
“I’m sorry,” I choke out. “I saw you kissing that girl, and all I could think about was how the paparazzi would describe her compared to me. Which is stupid, I know. But I was heartbroken and in my own head, and I ran like a coward. I’m sorry.”
“Why didn’t you talk to me?”
“Because I was completely gone for you, but I’d spent years reading about how I wasn’t pretty enough or talented enough. About how people bet my parents wished they had a daughter more like them. That shit fucks you up. And I guess I couldn’t bear the thought that you’d say the same thing. Because that girl who kissed you was so pretty, Sebastian. She had these long legs, curves in all the right places, and she was the kind of girl everyone always thought I should have been.”
Even at twenty-eight, the sting of those unmet expectations still hits like the crack of a whip across my scar tissue-riddled heart.
“Oh, Indie.” Sebastian sets his mug down on one of the bedside tables before taking mine from my hand and repeating the process. Then he scoots toward me, grabs me by the hips, and settles me on his lap.
One moment I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed, the next I’m straddling the man who was my best friend, then my greatest regret. How did I get here?
“How many times did I tell you that every single person who wrote dumb shit like that about you deserved to be thrown into the sea? That you were talented and smart and pretty?” He brushes my hair over my shoulder, then lets his fingers skim my collar bones and arms.
“You had to say that. You were my best friend.”
He huffs out a laugh, and I try not to notice the way each corresponding bounce of his body grinds my center against his lap. And his hardening dick. “Sweetheart, I wanted to be so much more than that.”
I want to laugh and cry. I want to bitch slap eighteen-year-old Indie into oblivion. But I also want to beat the shit out of every single paparazzo and so-calledreporterwho wrote horrifyingly cruel things about a teenage girl who was simplytrying to exist in a world that put too much emphasis on impossible beauty standards. “I didn’t know.”
He shakes his head. “I thought I was so obvious. Seriously, Indie, how did you not know? My mom used to tell me I looked at you with hearts in my eyes, and even a blind person could see that I wanted you.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Okay, Rosebud. You didn’t know. But now you do. So the question is, where do we go from here?” His hands skim down my soft sides, making me stiffen, before settling on my hips. “God, you’re beautiful.”
I have no idea how to respond to that, so I don’t. I just stare at him, unable to look away, but terrified I’ll catch an expression that tells me he’s lying.
I don’t.
“Seriously, Indie. I’ve never met a more beautiful, captivating woman. When I saw you in the stands that game, I thought I was hallucinating. But then I realized the pink was a hair color I’d never seen you photographed with, so I couldn’t be.” His fingers move back to my arms, tracing the black and gray flowers tattooed there that make up my sleeves. “And I don’t think you had full sleeves in the last photo I saw of you.”
The warm drag of his fingers along my skin makes me shiver. I never want him to stop touching me. “Were you stalking me, crab boy?”
“Please don’t start calling me that,” he says, chuckling. “But yeah. Tried, at least. You keep a pretty low profile.”
“You don’t.”
He nods. “Wanted it to be easy for you to find me.”
My poor heart stutters before picking up speed. “And that’s why you never changed your phone number.”
“I spent the first few years hoping you’d call,” he says as he traces the line work of an unfurling peony. “By the fifth year, Ifigured you’d probably deleted it, but I still couldn’t bring myself to change it.”
“I never deleted it,” I whisper. “Sometimes I’d sit in bed and stare at it. Daring myself to hit the call button. But I was too much of a coward.”