especially now. It was only a matter of time before Mel sat Kelsey down and told her, if she hadn’t already.
Mel shook her head. “That’s always been the thing with you, hasn’t it? It’s always what you don’t say. You always keep the truth to yourself, and you know what? That’s what makes things hurt even worse.”
Her words were true, but still I didn’t like hearing them.
“Let me ask you this: does Kelsey know about us? I’ve mentioned what happened last year with her, but I never got into many details because…” Mel paused, staring at me with an expression of pain. “Because it hurts to remember those days.”
I wanted to walk away from this conversation, pretend none of this was happening. This was all too real, and if there was one thing I didn’t handle well, it was real emotions—in case you didn’t already know. I was fucked up.
Eventually I said, “No, Kelsey doesn’t know about us. I didn’t tell her.”
“Did you know she was my roommate before you…” Slept together. Mel couldn’t even say it, not that I could blame her.
Shaking my head, I said again, “No. I didn’t know.”
“And once you found out, you and Dean came up with a plan to get back at me again?”
“This isn’t about you,” I told her, a bit harsher than I wanted to be. Well, in a way it was about her, because I’d refused Dean when he told me to talk to Kelsey and help convince her that she should tell Mel to get back with him. But everything else? No, it wasn’t about her. It was about me, and my inability to tell the truth, to fight for what mattered most to me.
“It’s not about me,” Mel repeated. “Has it ever been about me, or has it always been about Dean?”
“Mel, I—” This was the first time I’d spoken to her after what happened. There really was nothing to say.
She bent to pick up her bag, wrapping the strap around her shoulders. “I really don’t want to hear it, Levi. I only came to see if you were trying to play Kelsey like you played me, to tell you that you should just give up. Kelsey’s not like me. She’s stronger, and as soon as she sees that video, she’s going to hate you.”
I wanted to laugh, because that much was already true. That night at the party, me following her and Grady, interrupting their hookup, it had only been a temporary respite. I’d never really have Kelsey again.
Mel started to walk away, and it was as she walked away that I wondered if she’d go and talk to Kelsey about it. If they’d have a long heart-to-heart and confess their secrets to each other. If Mel told Kelsey what happened last year already, if she told Kelsey that it was me who was the last straw, Kelsey would never want to look at me again, and I couldn’t blame her.
I watched Mel leave, all the while standing there and letting my anger fester. This was a fuckfest of epic proportions, and I was going to beat the shit out of Dean for this. For dragging Mel into this. You’d think the asshole would’ve learned by now that Mel wasn’t his, that he’d fucked up and lost her—that there was no coming back from what he did. But no…
No, my life couldn’t be simple. I had to lose the one thing I actually cared about.
Kelsey.
Chapter Twenty-Three – Kelsey
Something was wrong with Mel, I knew. I knew something was wrong with her, because she was hardly talking to me, hardly looking at me. She never smiled anymore—not that she smiled much to begin with, but sometimes my snark got her to chuckle, at least. Not now. Not for the last few days. Something was bothering her, and it was for a purely selfish reason that I wanted to find out what it was.
Selfish because I could then focus on what was wrong with her instead of the multitude of things that were wrong with me. And there were a lot. My whole life felt like it was falling apart, and everything I did only added fuel to the fire.
It was a few days along when I could no longer take it. I was sitting at my desk, trying to outline a paper with three main subjects while doing some research on my phone—the bulk of my research would be done at the library after the outline was done—and she