Arrogant Bastard - Julie Capulet Page 0,50

see each other again for a while. She’s leaving at four on Sunday afternoon. I’ll go to the airport with her. Then I’ve got a yoga class at six. So I won’t be able to see you again this weekend.”

I don’t want to see him again. At all. I’ve already decided that. I don’t even want to co-own a business with him.

I don’t know what I want to do. Maybe I’ll go somewhere else for a while and let him take care of the upgrades on his own. Maybe I’ll go to New Orleans. Or Austin. I don’t know. Right now, I just feel tired.

“I’d like you to let me take care of your ride to the airport and back,” he says. “Josie will have a lot of stuff, I imagine. You might as well take the limo. I’ll have the driver pick you up at two thirty.”

I start to refuse but Josie would love that. “Sure. Thanks.”

I follow his gaze to the edge of the beach where the limo is already pulling up. “I’m going to pick you up and carry you. You’re tired and I don’t want you falling over or hurting yourself. I’ll be careful with you. Okay?”

I don’t have it in me to argue with him. I don’t think I’ve ever been this exhausted in my life. “Okay.”

He is careful with me. He carries me across the sand and places me on the back seat of the limo like I’m made of fine china. He feeds me some fries. I eat a few bites of a hamburger but I’m not hungry.

We don’t say much on the way back to the bar. The moving lights of Key West outside the tinted windows paint his face in shifting colors as he watches me. If you asked me to judge him on this moment alone, I’d never in a million years guess he was anything but a beautiful soul.

The limo pulls up outside the bar. “Gage,” I say, before he can jump out. “You don’t need to walk me in or carry me. I’m fine. Please. Please stay here.” I feel like if he touches me again I might shatter.

He obeys me, unhappily.

“Goodnight, Gage.”

“Goodnight, Luna. You’ll feel better. I promise.”

I can feel him watching me as I make my way inside. I don’t bother looking back.

Somehow I make it up the stairs. I let my ruined dress fall to the floor and I crawl into my bed, pulling the covers over my head.

Holy hell. Way to ruin an evening, Luna.

It’s good. It’s best this way. Now he’ll never want anything to do with you.

Sleep washes over me. The dark oblivion of it has never felt so good.

I can’t handle this.

I don’t recognize myself.

Damn everything to hell.

Did I leave a trail of wreckage and sadness?

No. I can honestly say that I’ve gone out of my way not to do that. I’ve slept with a lot of women. And I always made sure every single one of them knew exactly what they were getting into. I made sure they laughed and understood that it was about sex and only sex. Consent has never been an issue—and I made sure of it. It’s usually them hunting me down and me going with it. Their anger was about wanting more of what I gave them. I have never in my life had sex without a condom. And they were condoms I provided, in case any of them got any tricky ideas.

I want to fix her. I want to make everything okay again. I want to heal her and show her how beautiful she is. I want to make her feel good and whole and fully alive. I want to show her that, even though we all have things that have happened to us that change us and cut us down, it doesn’t mean we can’t be happy anyway.

That’s what I’m going to do.

Starting right now, I’m going take everything I’ve ever done—and everything anyone else has ever done—and make it all up to her.

Luna isn’t the only one with regrets.

Life is messy. And painful. It hurts sometimes. It’s hard not to get overwhelmed.

She coped by closing a part of herself off, for good reason. I’ve coped with my own demons by becoming cold. Hard. By behaving like an asshole a lot of the time, I know that. I’m aware that I’m doing it as I’m doing it. But the thing is, I’m not actually an asshole. Deep down there’s as much of the