Chapter 45
She heard the sound of the front door slamming, and then Cara knocked on her door. “He’s gone, Izzy. It’s only me.”
She opened the door.
“You okay?” Cara asked as Izzy sat back down at her desk.
“You’re studying?”
“I’ve got a lot on.”
“Hey.” Cara stood behind her and placed her hands on her shoulders. “Do you want to talk about it?”
There wasn’t much to talk about. She’d told Cara everything and hadn’t left her room since yesterday. It had been difficult, trying to hide her grief from Jacob as Morris drove them back, trying to put on a brave face to Savannah when she returned Jacob home.
She shook her head. “I’m done going over and over with it.”
It was worse than she imagined. She’d been holding out for the hope that Xavier would say it was all a mistake; that maybe Jacob had gotten his facts wrong, or misheard the conversation.
She had been banking on that.
But his denial never came.
Instead, he had confirmed her worst nightmare.
The bet was real.
A $10K bet.
Who in their right mind placed that kind of a bet?
People like these. Filthy, rich, dirty assholes. Like the man who had screwed her father over.
Never in her darkest nightmares had she imagined this would happen to her.
Never.
And what hurt more than Xavier’s deception, more than his cunning, more than all those intimate words and private moments they had shared, was that he had been playing her all along.
She had opened her heart up to him and told him everything. He knew things about her family and her father that Cara had no clue about.
How stupid could she have been? How blind, and so easy to dupe?
She had become one of those vacuous airheads, the girls who lost their mind over a guy—the kinds of girls she used to feel sorry for. And now she was one of them, except that she was the main character in her own romance-gone-wrong horror movie.
A tear rolled down her cheek and she wiped it away quickly. She had tried to be brave in front of Cara yesterday when she returned. Hadn’t wanted her friend to see how deep the deception had cut. How much it had broken her.
“You look rough, Iz,” Cara said, leaning against the wall, facing her. “A good cry will get it all out of your system.”
“I’m not going to cry over that asshole.”
“That’s my girl.” Cara smiled.
“I never expected this from him. Even now, when I think about everything he ever said to me—”
Everything he ever did to me.
“I can’t get my head around it. He was such a good actor.” She would never trust another man again.
“You turned soft in the head, Iz.”
Thanks.
She fell for him, and she’d let her guard down. If only she had been strong and stayed as wary of him as she had been on the island, she might not have ended up like this. Now she questioned every single thing—him coming to the apartment that first time when he’d come down to the pool in the basement, and when he’d told Savannah about Jacob’s fears about Tobias not loving him. Xavier had commandeered all of that. He’d made it so that she’d lost her job, and opened the way for him to give her more work just so that he could get close to her.
He had done whatever he’d needed, to win the bet. He’d ripped out her heart, her trust, her softness, and he’d made her feel like a commodity.
In the end, there really hadn’t been much difference in what Shoemoney had done, to what Xavier had done. Except that Shoemoney hadn’t done it for money, he’d done it out of a sense of perversion.
Xavier had done it for fun.
“I gave him a chance.”
“He must have been good in bed,” Cara chuckled, then retracted. “Sorry, Iz. That was low. I was only trying to make a joke.”
The situation was a joke.
Izzy looked up at her friend and confessed. “We never …”
“But that time I walked in.”
“We were just kissing.”
“Day-um,” drawled Cara. “You guys were in such a hot cinch that time, I really thought…” Cara paused, as if she was contemplating something. “It doesn’t matter what I thought. It’s probably for the best, Iz, that you didn’t give him everything.”
That was what their weekend away was supposed to be for. Time away from the city, somewhere nice, somewhere different, Xavier had said. ‘Just you, me and a whole lot of getting to know one another.’
Now it was another thing she viewed with suspicion.
And Luke.
Now the visit to The Oasis fell into place. That night she had put it down to paranoia, the way Xavier and Luke had spoken, as if in code, she had noticed it enough to remember it. She hadn’t expected Luke to be like that. The guy had seemed decent enough when she’d spoken to him at the island. But then she hadn’t known he owned the bar. More than a few bars and clubs, according to Xavier. The guy was loaded.
Typical.
Two filthy rich assholes together were going to be worse than one. She lowered her head, shame burning all over her as she placed a hand over her face.
“Stop it,” Cara said, getting up and putting her arms around her. “Don’t keep thinking about the past and all the stuff that went on. Let it go. You’re going to move on from this, and I’m going to help you.”
“I can’t help it. Every conversation we ever had, tells me what I so blindly failed to see. It was in my face the whole time. I thought he was changing because he was starting to feel something for me. I thought we were changing together, me giving him a chance, him confiding in me, me confiding in him.” The stuff of normal relationships. She had opened up to him because she had believed that he had genuinely cared. “Now I see it for what it really was. An act. And all for the sake of money. My feelings meant nothing to him.”
“You weren’t to know. So you have to stop beating yourself up about it.”
“You’re right,” she decided, drawing back her shoulders and lifting her head higher. As if she could magically harden her heart and wipe away the hurt and humiliation that now tormented her. “I’m going to stop whining, and I’m going to pick myself up and block him out of my head.”
“And what about all the work you do for him?”
“He can stick that up his ass.” She still had the babysitting job with Jacob, and, she hoped, more hours once Savannah’s pregnancy progressed. Maybe she wouldn’t need to go home for the summer, and could afford to stay on here. And if she got an internship for the summer, that would be the best news of all. It would pay well enough that she could stay in New York until the next year started. And that kind of experience would look good on her resume and possibly set her up for the future.
“I can’t think about him,” she said, massaging her temples. “I can’t waste my time on him anymore.”
“Chalk it down to experience, Iz. Guys like him are scum.”
“I can usually spot scum a mile off. I don’t know why I thought he would be different.”
It wouldn’t be a mistake she would ever make again.