sex was the last. After the date, I’m done with you. That’s it.”
He stilled, taking time to respond to my words, and when he did, it saddened me. “I won’t back off, not until I know you’re with someone.”
Brody was pushing himself and the idea of us to a point where I felt as if he was suffocating me. After all, the incident with Rob and me coming to terms with the rape and how I had somehow liked it was still fresh in my mind. How could I grasp something like that, something so vile that it made me vomit, yet I would get flashes of myself moaning as Rob fucked me hard? Rob was right; I had been begging for it. In my messed up mind, how could I fathom dealing with that on top of what Brody was offering me?
“What if I tell you that I like Carter?” I threw the gauntlet, bracing for the imminent backlash. There was no doubt there would be hell to pay for my insensitive comment, but I had to resort to something, or Brody would bulldoze his way into my life.
It wasn’t necessarily lying, I thought. Come to think of it, I did like Carter in every sense of the word. He had an amiable personality, and after getting to know him more in Athens, I was glad our friendship had blossomed into something more meaningful. So, in some ways, it wasn’t a white lie; it depended on how the counterpart perceived it, which wasn’t difficult to decipher given how strongly he had reacted to me staying in Carter’s bedroom.
Therefore, his doom and gloom didn’t come as a surprise. Also just as I expected, Brody released me as if he had just discovered I had cholera.
I still had my back against him, so I wasn’t sure what was going on with him, but from the sounds he was making, he felt like a ticking time bomb, ready to explode.
“Brody?” I croaked out meekly, knowing I had crossed the line with him, but it couldn’t be helped. He was asking for something I couldn’t give him.
Instead of responding to me, I felt his body shift before I heard the shuffle of the sheets and him sliding off the bed. Only then did I choose to turn my body to look at him, and the moment I did, I felt my heart break from the stone-like expression that greeted my eyes.
“Where do you think you’re going? We’re in the middle of a discussion,” I huffed out, perplexed at his harshness towards me by choosing to ignore me. Then, if I wasn’t shocked enough, he immediately got dressed with him barely buttoning his pants before he walked out of the room.
Maybe it was low blow to throw Carter’s name in the midst of this, given that the man had been kind enough to let me use his place while he was in training in Brazil, and there I was, stretching my welcome by using his name to make his best friend think I had my sights set on the well-known stud.
In a most tiresome manner, I slid out of bed, pondering what I should do. Should I seek him out and apologize or get on with my life just as I had planned, with Brody hating me from a distance? I wasn’t sure what I wanted from him. Apart from wanting to have a meaningful life instead of pining for this unrequited love, I knew I didn’t want a distorted relationship with him.
Plucking his abandoned shirt from the floor, I hastily dressed myself in it, deeply inhaling his amazing, familiar scent while doing so.
“If this was any other man…” I muttered to myself, knowing full well that I wasn’t going to intentionally hurt him and not apologize about it. I might not admit to the falseness of my insinuations, but I could at least say I was in the wrong for ever uttering some shitty stuff to him.
I left Carter’s room and paved my way across the hall to Brody’s bedroom. If he wasn’t in his room, he would most likely be in the kitchen, making coffee, and if he wasn’t there … Well, I supposed my apology could wait until whenever I encountered him next, which I was almost sure wasn’t far away.
Upon reaching his bedroom, I didn’t even give the courtesy of knocking. I simply had the balls to barge inside in an aggressive manner, ready to continue our argument. However, as