Work In Progress (Red Lipstick Coalition #3) - Staci Hart Page 0,124
tears to consider my mistakes as I held the shards of my heart in my hands, counting them one by one.
Tsunami
Tommy
The last thing I wanted to do was leave.
The only thing I could do was get the hell out of there.
Beyond the window of the Mercedes, the city rolled by. I didn’t see it. Imaginings of a dozen scenarios drifted in and out of my mind. Amelia and Janessa, head-to-head, plotting a takedown. Janessa asking her to betray me and Amelia agreeing with a hungry smile. The two of them laughing, raising a glass to their cleverness. Me holding Amelia, telling her I loved her, but her fingers crossed behind her back when she repeated the words. In every vision, she was a villain with a wicked smile and an expression on her face I’d never, ever seen—conniving.
But my imagination was active enough to be able to picture it without effort, my suspicion speculating the worst of all scenarios strictly to hurt me. To remind me that I’d brought this on myself.
My heart howled that I was wrong, that she’d never plot against me.
My brain said otherwise with stern, direct force. It had been silent for too long. My heart had steered us into an iceberg, and my brain was having no more of it.
Confusion was the closest I could get to a feeling. My emotions were a mosaic, and I was too close to see the whole. Manipulation in shades of orange. Betrayal in shades of red. Love in washes of blue like the ocean, brushing the edges of hurt in deep violet. Trust in fiery yellows, licking the oranges and reds like flames.
I loved her, and she’d hurt me.
She hadn’t meant to break me, but she’d been careless all the same.
She’d given Janessa my life, the truths I’d kept concealed for so long.
But the loop always came back to the heart of the matter—I’d let my guard down, and this was my penance.
I tore myself down with frantic hands, the reprimand fierce and violent. I’d trusted her implicitly—stupidly—from the first. She’d had to do so little to gain so much of my trust.
The day’s discoveries had shaken me to the foundation. It wasn’t even that she had betrayed me. I knew deep down, under layers and layers of anger and fear, that she hadn’t done it on purpose.
But I had betrayed myself. That, I found, was as difficult to reconcile as the knowledge that Amelia had been working with Janessa behind my back, had loaded the cannon for my enemy. Amelia touched my greatest fear. She was everything I’d been running from, and I’d welcomed her into my heart without hesitation.
I was living the blessing and curse of that choice.
The worst part of it all, the regret and guilt of my heart, was that I’d created her. I had corrupted her in ways beyond comprehension by putting her in this place, by tenderly setting her in the lion’s den and assuming she would do exactly as I wished. But she hadn’t.
Amelia. My Amelia. I knew her so well, knew every curve of her face, every fleck of gray and silver in the ocean of her irises. But being confronted and hearing her confession had taken everything I’d believed and scrawled an asterisk in blood red next to her name. The seed of doubt was barbed, a thorny, poisonous kernel of truth, hooking in my mind and in my heart, spreading with astounding speed.
My fist closed, elbow resting on the door. The vision of her as I walked away filled my mind. Her shining hurt, her searing pain had stripped me bare, left me raw, more raw than the betrayal. Because she loved me, and she was sorry. And I loved her, but I was hurt, too hurt to do anything but run.
Time would do me—us—good. Time would quiet my fears. Time would see the tsunami of distrust receding to leave the truth. But for the moment, I was caught under the wave, tossed and spinning in the undercurrent, trying to figure out which way was up and which way was death.
I only had to find the sun.
Honeybear
Amelia
The morning sunlight cut through the room in a wedge of light, its cheer and promise lost on me.
Claudius lay curled on my chest in a swirl of vibrating fur as I stared at my ceiling just like I had all night, watching the surface shift in color from midnight to violet, the shadows receding as the sun rose.