The alcohol was sending liquid courage through her veins, and still her stomach knotted with anxiety. How would he take what she was about to say? She had told Victoria that the worst thing that could happen would be for Hayden to leave her. The uncertainty ate away at her. Was he going to blow up on her? Was he going to just be shocked? She wouldn’t know until she told him, but as she stood there in front of him, her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.
“What do we need to talk about?” Hayden asked, clearly frustrated. He straightened himself, crossed one leg over the other at the ankle, and leaned forward.
She could tell that he had no idea what she was about to throw at him. There was no way she could approach this as she had with Victoria. At that time, she had just blurted out that she had kissed someone else, but with Hayden she couldn’t imagine what that would do to him. She couldn’t break him.
“Um . . . I’ve been meaning to tell you this for a long time,” she began carefully. “I just didn’t know how to say it.”
“Didn’t know how to say what?” Hayden asked. There wasn’t any caution in his voice at all. He had no clue. She hated herself for what she was about to do to him in that moment.
“I know you might be mad with me, but please just let me explain.”
That sure captured his attention. He sat up straighter and his hazel eyes narrowed. She could see that he was trying to figure out where this was going, and that he hadn’t expected that at all. There was no going back now.
“So . . . two summers ago, I was dating someone else,” Liz began.
“You were?” he asked clearly confused.
“Yeah. I met this guy, and we had this secret relationship the summer before my junior year. I was still seeing him when I visited you in D.C.”
Hayden’s eyebrows rose sharply at that comment. She hated telling him the whole story, but she knew that she needed to. He wouldn’t understand if she didn’t start from the beginning.
“It was a strange relationship. One that’s kind of hard to explain. One that up until last week, I’d never told anyone else about. We weren’t exactly exclusive, but . . .” Liz cringed. She wished there were an easier way to explain this. “Anyway, I was with you in D.C. and then sometime shortly after school started, he and I broke it off. Well, I left him.”
“Why are you telling me all of this?” Hayden asked, unable to keep the slight tone of anger out of his voice.
She didn’t blame him.
“Because I saw him again in October.”
Hayden stopped moving. He had only been slightly fidgeting with his suit coat and tapping his foot, but when she said that he stopped everything and just stared at her.
“When in October?”
She could tell that he already knew the answer. Her heart pounded away in her chest. This was going to be even more difficult than she thought.
“When we had our argument,” she whispered.
Hayden stood at the statement. He walked to the end of the bed and rested his hand on the footboard, facing away from her. His chest was rising and falling with barely concealed anger and pain . . . betrayal.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you this whole time, but I never found a way. There was always something else.”
“What happened?” he asked, his voice cold.
“He picked me up from the paper. We kissed. That’s it,” she said earnestly.
Hayden sagged against the footboard. He brought his hand to his head and she saw his shoulders shake. There. She had broken him. And it hurt so f**king bad. She couldn’t even see his face, but she knew, she just knew that she had hurt him beyond compare. She could imagine his face crumpled and the hollowness in his eyes at her words.
“I swear it will never happen again. We agreed to never see each other after that,” she told him. It hadn’t gone exactly that way, but it wasn’t as if it wasn’t the truth. “I felt so terrible, and I wanted to tell you, Hayden. I really did.”
“Then why didn’t you?” he asked, his voice the same cold calculation.
“I don’t know.”
He turned around sharply. “I was a total prick to you that day. I was completely a hundred percent in the wrong. And I owned up to that. I told you exactly everything that I did, and you let me sit there and grovel. I might have pushed you back to him that day, but you had your opportunity to tell me what happened and you chose not to.”
“I know,” Liz whispered, tears welling in her eyes. She could have told him what had happened. She could have been honest, but she hadn’t.
“I felt like absolute shit for months. I tried to do everything I could to be better. Calleigh has been breathing down my f**king throat since I started working there. Why don’t I just go back to Charlotte and kiss her?”
Liz gasped. Her hands flew to her face and tears fell from her eyes. “No.”
“It wouldn’t be any different, would it?”
“No,” she whispered, shaking her head. She didn’t know if she answered him or if she was just horrified at the thought.
“Did he try anything else?” Hayden demanded, the fire still in his eyes.
Liz shook her head.
“Don’t f**king lie to me!” he yelled.
Liz took a step back, startled by the outburst. It so wasn’t Hayden. “Yes! Okay! Does it make you feel better?” she cried. “He wanted to f**k me. But I didn’t let him. I made him take me back home. All right?”
“Jesus Christ, Liz,” Hayden spat. “You had another guy’s hands on you, another guy’s lips on you, another guy’s body against yours . . .”
“I didn’t say . . .”
“Who is it?” he demanded.
“Hayden, I can’t.”
He walked slowly toward her until he was standing directly in front of her. She cowered slightly at the feel of him hovering over her. “Liz, who is it?” he asked, his voice low and deliberate.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It f**king matters,” he growled.
Liz bit her lip and stared down. She couldn’t tell him. No f**king way.
“Is he at the paper?”
She glanced back up into his eyes and shook her head. “No.”
“It’s not Justin?”
Liz laughed and then quickly cleared her throat. So not appropriate.
Hayden glared at her. “Are you actually laughing? Do you find something about this funny?”
“No. No, it wasn’t Justin,” she squeaked.