Page 24 of The Score We Never Settled

“Keep doing that,” she urges me, keeping her hazel eyes on anything other than me. “Then maybe you’ll move on.”

“Now, where’s the fun in that when no one compares to you?”

She scoffs. “I think your girlfriend would have something to say about that.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend.” Her focus slices over to me, written with murder all over it. “I thought you didn’t follow up on me.”

“I don’t.”

“Then you’d know gossip columns aren’t always the most reliable source around. Besides, she was launching her reporting career and needed a boost. Dragging my name into it only helped her get to where she was.”

“You come up with a fake-dating agreement, too?”

“Did I like the last one?”

I don’t get a response to that either; however, I didn’t need her to answer.

Her solution to seeing me when we were in high school was to fake-date Cruz Weston because it was the only boy her Uncle Ben seemed to like.

The golden boy.

The charitable, church-going, fake-as-fuck golden boy who was selfish, self-serving, and petty as hell.

Her Uncle Ben didn’t know that his handpicked option for his niece was just looking to fuck her to say he had. That he had agreed to Layla’s proposal, while she helped him pass chemistry in return, was just to get under my skin for two years.

And beyond.

Layla continues to stare up at me and, fuck me, I missed her. Happy, mad, sad, irritated, excited, all of it. I missed every emotion illuminating from her eyes and her in my damn arms.

In my damn bed.

“Your boy is allegedly coming back to town,” I divulge in warning. “Your uncle will be ecstatic, I’m sure. However, you’d better keep me occupied, Short Stop.” I lean in, smelling sugar, and my cock instantly hardens in my jeans. “And it better be good. Because the first moment I see him…I’m bashing his head in until he understands that there was never a point in time when you belonged to him. You belong to me. You still do. And nothing and no one is going to change that for me.”

6

LAYLA

“Here.”

A bottle of Michelob Ultra appears in my line of sight, breaking into my view of the raging bonfire before me and barreling through all my thoughts.

Cruz Weston is here.

In town.

In Magnolia Ridge.

And so is Briggs.

It’s going to be World War III.

Mindlessly plucking the well-needed beer from Fallon’s grasp, I bring it to my lips and begin to chug.

“It’s gonna be fine,” my best friend assures me, settling up next to me on the thick log that’s always acted as a makeshift chair.

We’ve been having bonfires like this every fourth Saturday of the month since high school. The folks that are still here, we still carry on the tradition to talk crap, getting away from the gossip in town, and talk about our own, and chill from the long month we just endured.

For me, it’s been the longest twenty-some-odd hours I’ve ever endured.