“But why?” It made zero sense to me.
“At this point, do you really need to ask? I tried to put myself between you and a bullet, and almost succeeded.” He met my gaze then, and what I saw in his eyes stole the thoughts right out of my head, and the words from my lips. He sighed, then looked away again. By the time he looked back at me, my heart was beating so hard, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had burst clean out of my chest. “What he said about us was right. About me I mean. I have... feelings for you... big feelings.”
When I didn’t say anything, just stared with my mouth agape, he carried on, “I love you. I’m in love with you. Fuck, I don’t know. I just know that there was a connection there from the start, and when I thought you might die, I was prepared to do anything to prevent that from happening. That’s it. Whatever that is, that’s where I’m at.” He shrugged apologetically with those last words, and went back to staring at the floor.
“Well, then, I guess he’s way better at reading people than you are.”
“What?” God, I needed to stop meeting his gaze. I’d managed to cheat death in that warehouse when Kane had been willing to give his own life for mine, but now he was killing me with the look in his rich, brown eyes.
“I love you too, and I’m not just saying that because you saved my life. I felt that way even before you took a gunshot wound for me, or tried to. I mean, I couldn’t define it before. It was kind of a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach that I couldn’t put a name to, you know? But when that gun came out, and I had no idea which, if either of us would survive, I finally found the word I’d been looking for.”
My voice faltered, and I took a deep breath, trying to steady my frazzled nerves. “But I’ve barely known you a hot minute, and let’s face it, given the way the two of you have treated me in that short time, I have no business feeling anything for you other than contempt. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of that too, but I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that the other feelings are there.
I love Rhea more than life, and there was never going to be any other choice but her in that situation, but stupidly, and against my better judgement, I do love you.
The broad grin stretching across his face almost tore my heart in two. He was too much.
Chapter 5
Kane
“So what are we going to do?” I rubbed my forehead, frowning as I spoke.
“Do?”
“Yeah, about this epic clusterfuck. My best friend, or ex-best friend, or whatever the fuck he now is to me, has gone rogue, and we live together, so that’s going to be majorly awkward. Then there’s you, and the way I feel about you, and the way he feels about you.”
“Yeah, about that. What exactly does he feel?” She squinted as she questioned me.
“Look, I’m not him, and maybe if you asked him, he’d tell you something different—”
“I’m sure he’d tell me to shoot myself in the head.” Her sarcasm game was strong.
“Yeah, there’s that, but I think his feelings are way more complicated than that.”
“How so?”
“Well he hates you.”
“Which is actually not that complicated, is it? He hates me, and wants me dead. Simple.” Her voice was heavy, and laced with sadness.
“It would be, if it was one-hundred-percent true. In reality, my hunch is that he wants to despise you, and I know he definitely thinks he should, but I suspect he’s eaten up inside with guilt, because the truth is that deep down, he doesn’t hate you. Not even close, and maybe he never did.”
“I don’t think I’m following you.”
“Did you have any idea back in the day that he had feelings for you?”
“Not a clue. I mean, why would I? Everything he said was true, I was a raving bitch, and a bully, or at least, that’s what everyone else in the school saw. Why would someone who bore the brunt of what Charlie and I dished out feel that way about me? I hated me. It was just my natural assumption that everyone else did too, even those who pretended not to, out of fear.”
“Not Fox. He was deeply into you for years, which I think confused him, for the exact reasons you mentioned. Why would he love someone who treated him that way?”
“It wasn’t love though, it can’t have been. He didn’t even know me. Not the real me, anyway. He was infatuated with a caricature of me. The person he thought I was, and the world thought I was. The ‘perfect’ Mean Girl/It Girl—head to toe in designer everything, popping my gum and rolling my eyes, and dishing out vitriol to anyone who dared look my way, like it was an Olympic sport. But the whole thing was just pantomime. That wasn’t me, and what he felt wasn’t love.”
“Maybe not, but to him at the time, it was, and it was a big part of him for a long while. Maybe longer than he wants to have to admit.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, like I said, I can’t know for sure, but let’s just say that I don’t think his feelings for you died when Julian did, and if that was the case, I know he’d have felt like the most disloyal brother on the planet as a result. Even worse than that, I think he thought he’d moved on from all of that, and was intent on destroying you. Then he met you, and it brought back a lot of the buried emotions. When we all slept together, I believe it made that confusion even worse, which is why he behaved so strangely when we were done.”
“But how can that be? Like I said, he never knew the real me, but even if he thought he did, that’s not who I am now. Tabitha and Rose are two completely different people. I don’t even look the same, now that my hair is no longer blonde. Plus, we’d barely met this time around, before the three of us were screwing each other’s brains out, so again, he doesn’t even really know me. How can he ‘love’ both versions? There’s nothing there to love, just an illusion.”
He put his hands up in surrender. “Don’t shoot the messenger. And in fact, I’m not even really that. Like I said, if you ask him about any of this, he’d probably deny it all, and tell you something totally different. So I don’t know how it’s possible, I just know that it is, and that’s what I think is going on with him right now.”
“Well, there are more holes in your theory than in a honeycomb, but the biggest one of all is that if it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all right now. If he’d gotten his way, I’d be dead. If that’s how he treats people he claims to love, I’d hate to see what he does to his enemies.”
“But that’s the thing. I think that in having you shoot yourself, he was proving to himself that he wasn’t the terrible brother he’d been beating himself up for being. Basically he was demonstrating—or at least, attempting to demonstrate—that his love for Jules trumps everything else. On the other hand, he knew that there was no way in hell I was going to let you shoot yourself. This way he could tell himself that he wasn’t in love with you, but also not need to have you die. As far as he was concerned, it was a win-win.”
“Do you realize just how epically crazy that sounds?”