my eyes.
“Don’t fall in love with me, Eden, because I can never love you back.”
Holy hell. What did I just do?
Seventeen
EDEN
“I did something epically stupid,” I tell Jess, my arm covering my eyes as I lay on my bed in the predawn hours. Shockingly, I fell asleep okay. But then around four am I woke up in a panic. I checked my cell phone. I checked my freaking keys locked away in my purse that’s stored in the safe in the closet. My email. The song we had finished recording yesterday.
Everything.
But even as I was going through all that, I knew what woke me up that way. I knew why I was freaking the hell out. It’s the same thing that had me playing it cool all yesterday afternoon while completely avoiding Henry.
“With the album? I thought you said that was going well.”
“It’s going really well. Awesome, in fact. I mean, yesterday we finished the song we had been working on in LA and today we’re set to start something new. Oh, and in a not so unexpected twist, did you miss the part where I said I did something epically stupid?”
“What do you mean by epically stupid?” she smarts, clearly not taking this as seriously as she should.
I pinch my eyes shut behind my arm. I take a deep breath. “I might have slept with Henry. Twice.”
“Might have?”
“Um. Well. Yeah. I did.”
She starts laughing into the phone. Hysterically. To the point where I have to pull the phone away because the sound is hurting my eardrums. She does this for about three minutes, no joke. “That was fast. I had the over under on a week into the trip. Not day one. Must be all that Hawaiian air.”
“Har. Har.”
“Tell me everything,” she demands. “Give me all the details. How was it? Better than the first time?”
“Jess,” I whine. “I screwed up. And it was a mistake. For so many freaking reasons.”
“Okay,” she says, finally getting into business mode. “Lay it on me.”
So I do. I launch into everything that’s happened since I got here and Henry and I started our wham, bam, thank you ma’am sessions. Everything. Including all the promises and warnings we’ve made. Right down to the… “Don’t fall in love with me, Eden, because I can never love you back.”
“Damn. That’s actually what he said?”
“Yup.” That’s all the energy I’ve got left. Just getting that entire story out was taxing enough. Plus, it’s only something like six in the morning.
“Um. Okay then. Wow. I have like fifty thousand questions with that. What did you do after he said that?”
I throw my arm over my head, my fist smacking down into an overly plush pillow. “I think I said something along the lines of no problem Broken Joe and did the hundred-yard dash faster than an Olympic gold medalist. Then I proceeded to avoid him for the rest of the night.”
“You did all that minus calling him Broken Joe, right?”
I roll my eyes though I’m the only one here. I have no idea why I’m taking his words this hard. I don’t want to fall back in love with him. I don’t want a relationship with him. And I already knew he was a mental disaster. So this reaction? Yeah, I have no answers.
“Obviously.”
“But you just told me you agreed to sex with no strings. To vacation sex only. That you don’t want him for anything beyond that.”
“All true.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight then. You don’t want anything beyond sex with him and he doesn’t want anything else but sex with you. You both agreed to keep feelings off the table so you’re freaking out why exactly?”
You didn’t hear the way he said it.
“Because what if I can’t keep feelings off the table?” I whisper the words, my greatest fear when it comes to Henry vocalized. A man I was obsessed with for so much of my life, I hardly remember a time when I wasn’t.
“It doesn’t sound like you have a choice.”
“Thanks,” I grumble.
“Okay. Listen. Truth, after everything you’ve been through with Chad, I think you’re entitled to some safe, no-strings fun. Henry is telling you point blank it won’t go anywhere. That it has a real and finite expiration date. So stop thinking so much about it. Stop reading into it. Take his words for exactly what they are. A warning to heed. In fact, you should continue to hate him. That way, you won’t fall in love with him and he