“Almost.”
I lower my gaze to his mouth. “We must have kissed longer than ten minutes.” I’m getting a little flushed just thinking about it. “Did I stop you?”
“Hardly, but before the dew dried on the grass the next morning, you ran to Margaret Rose and said we had sex on the bar.” He pours another two fingers of Maker’s Mark. “I don’t know who you were trying to hurt more, me or her. In the end it didn’t matter. You were the only one to walk away happy.”
“If you two loved each other, why’d she believe me?”
“She said a guy was more likely to lie about having sex than a girl. And I guess dating other people when we were a thousand miles apart bothered her more than she let on. She said I was a cheater, and nothing I said or did changed her mind.”
“Where is she now?”
“She lives in Grosse Pointe Woods with her husband and children.”
“Do you still love her?” I take a sip and cough into my free hand.
“No, but it took a while.” He shoves the cork into the bottle. “Her family quit speaking to my family. My family believed me, and yours believed you, so they didn’t speak for a few years, either. It was quite a scandal. Oliver Hunt takes advantage of eighteen-year-old Edie Randolph Chatsworth-Jones. Yes, the Randolph Chatsworth-Jones. I was the villain and you got to be the victim.”
I know why Edie tried to fool and manipulate me at the hospital. I can believe what he’s saying, but still I ask, “Why would I lie about something like that?”
“Who knows what motivated you to do anything. It took Burton dating my little sister to repair all the damage. Your brother never believed you, and by that time, Marvin and Clarice didn’t either.”
If all of this is true, it would explain my first meeting with the parents at UMC El Paso. “What happened to make them believe you and not me?”
He shrugs. “I didn’t ask, and they didn’t volunteer an explanation. I can only speculate that some of your lies caught up to you, and they started to question everything you ever did or said. Their apology to me enraged you.”
It seems a lot of the things that enraged Edie don’t bother me at all. She was ruthless when she stole my sparkly path, and I’m not shocked that she took things so far with Oliver. I’m not shocked that she wanted to get naked with Oliver, either. When I thought we were friends, I had sin in my heart for him, too. Even now I want to talk about those blank pages, starting with the first time we kiss. I set my glass on the bar. “You skipped over a whole lot of the story. How far did ‘one thing led to another’ get before you stopped?”
“Why?”
Because I’m curious and getting even more flushed just thinking about it. Lucky for him I’m not the Brittany Lynn Snider who would have jumped on him before he got away, but I still have the same feelings and needs for love and affection. I’m not the Edie who broke hearts and carried on with married men, but I still want to be swept away by somebody special. I want to know what that feels like for the first time in my life. I’m neither Brittany Lynn nor Edie. I’m me. I want to know what it feels like to be me. “I don’t
remember that night. I only have your word on what happened, and you could be embellishin’.”
“Why would I do that?”
“So you can blame me.”
“I don’t blame you for what happened between us that night. Only for what happened after.”
I take a sip of whiskey and only choke a little this time. “You’re hangin’ on to the past.”
“That’s why I’m here. To put the past to bed.” His voice drops a notch. “So to speak.”
“As long as you look at me and see somebody else, someone I’m not and don’t remember, that can’t happen.”
“I don’t know what I see when I look at you. You’re two people in the same body.”
“No.” I’m one person in a different body. “Think about it like identical twins, and I’m the good one you never met before.”
He raises a brow and one corner of his mouth turns up. “How good?”
“Can’t say. I haven’t had the chance to be bad.” I clink my glass to his and flip my hair like I’m wearing my sassy pants. “Not yet.”
He chuckles and raises the glass to his lips.
“I’m a born-again virgin.”
Now it’s his turn to choke. “A what?”