Chapter 39
Asher
“Hey, you can use the house tonight if you want. My plans changed.”
“What do you mean they changed?” Conn asks, skepticism in his voice. I’ve wanted that fucking house every year for the last five years and now that I have it, I’m giving it up. Yeah, he knows something’s up. I’m glad I’m having this conversation over the phone. It would be much harder to lie to his face.
“Just what I said. Something’s come up.”
I hear rustling in the background and a few seconds later, it sounds like his breathing’s picked up. Wow, starting early, huh? “Asher, what did you do?”
That pisses me off. “Oh, what? Because I would be the one to do something, right? Not her.”
“Well, yeah.”
“You don’t know shit.”
“And you’re probably jumping to conclusions, as usual. Jesus, Asher, do you have to sabotage every good thing you have?”
“I’m done with this conversation. Take the house if you want it. If not, fuck off.”
I no sooner hang up on him than I hear pounding on my door.
Asshole.
“What?” I growl, opening the door before I walk back to the couch, where I sit with a nice, strong, mostly vodka Bloody Mary. Who the piss cares if it’s only nine o’clock in the morning? Maybe this will help me pass the fuck out, because God knows I didn’t get even a wink last night as I lay wide-eyed in my bed wondering how this could have happened to me yet again.
This time, however, I will not recover. Pain lances every cell of my body this morning even worse than last night. I’m finding it hard to breathe. To think. To give a fuck about anything but numbing my heartbreak.
“Tell me what happened.”
“No.”
“I’m not leaving until you do.” He eyes my Bloody Mary and then snatches it from my hand before I have a chance to react.
“Prick,” I snip.
“Grow the fuck up. What happened?” Conn takes a seat in the loveseat across from me, resting an ankle on his opposite knee.
I stay silent, having no intention of divulging my stupidity over a woman once again to my twin. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, well…I don’t even know what to do with that. What I do know is there won’t be a third fucking time. I’m strictly a hit-it and quit-it guy from now on.
“Do you love her?” he asks.
“This isn’t about love.”
He nods. “I’ll take that as a yes. Where is she?”
“I don’t know. Probably still in the arms of that fucking photographer I caught her with a few hours ago.”
Conn’s unable to contain his reaction before masking it. “Cooper Jensen?”
“The one and only.”
“What were they doing?”
“Sleeping.”
“Naked?”
“No,” I reply, shaking my head. It was so much worse than that.
“There has to be an explanation,” he retorts. His optimism just pisses me the hell off sometimes.
“You always think there’s an explanation, Conn. I stood there quite a long fucking time staring at him holding my woman as they slept trying to figure out if my warped mind was playing tricks on me, but after about ten minutes it finally sank in that it wasn’t a goddamn hallucination and I left.”
“Without confronting them? Getting answers?”
“No, I didn’t confront them. They looked pretty fucking cozy. It’s simple, as it always is, brother. I was played. Again.”
He’s silent for a few minutes. Guess that shut him up.
“Did you ever cheat on Natalie?” he finally asks.
Or not.
“How are you turning this around on me?”
“Just answer the question. You ever cheat on her?”
“No.”
“She’s convinced you did. She says that’s the only reason she turned to this guy was because she thought you were sleeping with someone else and she wanted to hurt you like you’d hurt her.”
“I was one hundred percent faithful to her for the entire time we were together, even though she obviously didn’t deserve it. I never gave her any reason to think I was cheating. So I guess that’s on her then.”
“You’re missing the point.”
Sighing heavily, I play along even though that’s the last thing I want right now. I want to drink. I want to forget. I want to figure out how the hell I’m going to move one step ahead, let alone an entire lifetime without the woman who has herself buried so deep inside me I know I’ll never be free of her. “What is the point, Conn?”
“Assumption. The whole point is she assumed something that wasn’t true was. And she’s regretted it ever since. Don’t make the same mistake, Asher. Don’t assume you know what you saw. It could be entirely innocent. Talk to Alyse. She doesn’t seem like the cheating kind to me and I think you know that.”
He rises and hands back my cocktail before clasping me on the shoulder. “In our entire lives, I’ve never known you to quit on anything. For years, you even fought for that doomed relationship you had with Natalie. Don’t quit now. Fight like the tenacious bastard I know you are. You are meant to marry this woman, brother. I feel it. I see it every time I watch you two together. So swallow your goddamn pride and fight for her. Even if there is something going on with this guy, which I doubt, then fight for her anyway. If you fuck this up because you let your pride get in the way, you’ll live the rest of your life under nothing but a mountain of regret. And trust me, that’s no way to live.”
Then he leaves me alone with my hard liquor and a crushed heart to mull over his words.