Rosie froze, the content smile on her face immediately disappearing into a frown as I questioned her. I was desperately trying to reign in my emotions but I could feel my facade slipping. As much as I hated it, I couldn’t help but be angry at her.

She lied to me.

I let her into my home, my bed, my fucking art, only for her to conveniently leave out the fact that she had a goddamned fiancé.

I tried to calm myself, rid my mind of the rushing thoughts of betrayal. There had to be some explanation. Some perfectly reasonable reason that she had kept something like this from me. Maybe this was what she was running from.

The short conversation with the man on the other end of the phone had only lasted enough time for him to introduce himself as her fiancé. His tone, while slightly angry and anxious, definitely hadn’t indicated any extreme hostility, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been something slightly more unhinged lurking underneath. Something angry and violent enough to cause my Rosie to run away from him. To outright refuse to speak of him.

My mind was racing, filled with all kinds of awful possibilities. Had she been abused? Had he cheated on her? Had I been wrong all along, had I been ensnared by some pretty young rich girl looking for a good time away from her privileged life?

It was time for her silence to end. I was done waiting for her to open those pretty lips and tell me the truth about herself.

“So?” I tried my hardest not to raise my voice at her but my self-control was hanging on by a thread.

Rosie refused to look at me, staring instead at her white, painted toes on the kitchen tile. “So, what?”

“Who was the man on the phone?”

“It was no one.”

“Goddamn it, Rosaline!” My voice climbed higher, tone angrier and more desperate than I ever wanted it to be when directed towards her. “It’s time for you to stop lying.”

She looked up at me, those big brown eyes wide in shock and full of unshed tears. “I haven’t been lying to you, Dex!”

“The hell you haven’t. Lying by omission is still lying, Rosie.” It took everything I had to keep my distance from her. I had to stay away. The closer I got, the more I would want to touch her and I couldn’t bear to have her in my arms right now. Not when I wasn’t sure she was really the woman I thought she was.

Rosie’s jaw twitched and her little hands clenched at her sides. “I didn’t omit anything, Dex,” she spat my name out harshly, her lips curling even farther downward. “It just wasn’t your business.”

I stared at her in disbelief. “The fuck it isn’t-”

She cut me off, her face twisted into a scowl but still unable to meet me eyes. ”What was I supposed to do? Spill my life story to some guy I had just met?” She threw her arms up. “My fucking boss?”

“So what, Rosie? You thought you could lay up in my house, get fucked a few times by ‘some guy you just met,’ and run back to your fiancé?”

Rosie said nothing, her head shaking slowly back and forth.

“Then what, Rosie? What the hell is it?” I was officially fed the fuck up. “You can fuck someone you barely know but you don’t have the decency to tell him you belong to somebody else?”

“It’s complicated, Dex. But I promise,” she took a long pause. “I swear, Daniel isn’t my fiancé. He isn’t my anything.”

“He seems to think he is.”

“Well he’s a fucking idiot,” she snapped, her voice suddenly acrid with disdain.

She sounded so sure in her declaration that it gave me pause. Barely a couple minutes in and I was already growing tired with this argument. Fighting with her wasn’t going to solve a damned thing. She needed to talk to me. I needed to finally make her talk to me. No deflections, no side stepping, no more fucking bullshit.

“I want the truth, Rosie. All of it.”