Breathless (172 page)

I was embarrassed. What girl wouldn’t be? I was an awkward freshman with blood pouring from her nose as two hot football players walked up apologizing profusely. The fact that they were both guys from Walker Creek’s founding families made it even worse than if it were just two hot guys with no family lineage in this town. No girl, especially a damn freshman, wanted to be bleeding to death in front of one of these guys.

Hell, they didn’t even need to be from the founding families in order for me to get all tongued tied and what not. Their looks alone were enough to make my fourteen-year-old body squirm uncomfortably. The butterflies in my stomach performed somersaults like Olympic Gold Medalists.

And when they fought over which one would take me to the nurse’s office… something deep down inside told me that their friendship would never be the same after that. Back then, I thought it was guys just horsing around, being stupid, and trying to make me, the measly fourteen-year-old girl, nervous. Killian had been seventeen at the time and Duncan eighteen. I had no reason to think that they were fighting over me, but they were. It just took six long years to figure out what the tension meant that day.

Killian won and took me to the nurse, and when I look back on that day, knowing what I do know now, I wish I could take it back, take it all fucking back. When I asked who threw the ball that slammed into my face, Killian said it was Duncan whilst Duncan said it was Killian. Killian’s cocky blue eyes and his messy blond hair put me in a trance, and I believed everything that came out of his mouth. So I took his hand when he offered it, and let him escort me down to the nurse. It was the worst decision I could’ve possibly made, and one I won’t ever be able to forget.

That day all started with that fucking ball, a ball that the cocksucker I’m addicted to threw at me.

If I could take back all the years I have spent with him since the day that ball almost broke my nose, I would. I would have given Duncan the fair shot he very well deserved, but I didn’t, and now I am facing all those decisions I made and the consequences that they bear.

Love is never easy. It carries unimaginable weight.

Do I believe that Killian and I, all along, were just a crash course waiting to happen? No, I don’t. It was beautiful at one point in time. It was years ago, but it had its moments.

The first year went by smoothly. If you disregard the stares we got from Duncan and his brothers and sister. At the time, I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world. I was dating a junior, and the buzz around town that it was a Reid no less made it that more magical. Every freshman girl’s dream was to date an older guy or one of Walker Creek’s social elite. I happened to have both wrapped up in the sexiest package.

It wasn’t until Killian’s senior year that things went south for us. An entire year of bliss vanished into thin air. His becoming a senior took everything away. He was too busy for me, he was suddenly surrounded by more girls than the previous year, and right out of the blue, he wanted to try the whole open relationship thing. I was devastated and desperately in love with him. And being only a fifteen-year-old girl with one relationship under her belt, I agreed to the open relationship. I didn’t know jack shit about it at the time, but I soon found out that it meant way more than I assumed it would.

I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I thought that he would just take girls out, do a little dating, and then come to his senses. Boy was I wrong. Between the little time he spent with me, and the whole lot of time he spent with the other girls, it became quite clear where I stood in the mix. So I did the inevitable. I cried, begged, and pleaded with him to stop seeing the other girls. After a few minutes of my blubbering, he sighed and agreed to see only me again. I was ecstatic.

Did it last long? No. Just like in the movies, I walked in on Killian screwing another girl during the first summer break party of the year. I was a mess. Killian tried to tell me it was because I wouldn’t have sex with him and that he was an eighteen-year-old boy. Like that was all the reason he needed to justify being caught. Again, I was left wrecked. It took everything I had to break up with him right then and there.

And just like every other tragic teen love story, it didn’t last long. He did, of course, go to college while I attended my junior year, but when he returned for his summer break, he was back at it again, wooing me with all that Reid swagger.

It didn’t take him long either before I was pining over him all over again. He gave me a happy summer, and I gave him my virginity. It didn’t last before I added that mistake to my belt of idiocy. Killian went back to college, the calls and texts stopped coming, and I was just the girl back home who screwed him all summer long. Again, I was left shattered and wallowing in my own stupidity.

The following summer before my senior year, I thought everything would be different for me. I was blossoming into a woman, and other guys were finally noticing my looks. It felt freeing, but once Killian arrived back home, that feeling was gone.

During that summer, everything changed. Not only because my looks were growing, but so had Killian’s. He looked every bit as a man should. My attraction to him slowly morphed into something else entirely. It turned into an addiction. And it wasn’t just on my side this time. Finally, Killian was having the same problem with me that I was having with him. We couldn’t stand to be apart or to stop touching. It made all the pain from the last two years evaporate. It was like none of it had happened at all. Everything was fresh and exciting again. It was everything I dreamed it should be.

And then, summer was over, and when all the previous years’ memories surfaced, I knew where our relationship was already heading. This time it broke me down until nothing was left of me. I cried day and night. I stopped eating. I stopped caring what I looked like. It got so bad that I was going to school without brushing my hair or changing out of my pajamas. He had officially ruined me. There was literally nothing left of me but skin and bones and nasty bags under my eyes. I was a tragic case, and it took my best friend months to pull me out of the slump that he left me in.

By the time I was back to normal, I had graduated high school and it was summer break all over again. True to my own stupid, masochistic ways, I took him back when he came home. I was a glutton for punishment. How many damn times would this man have to hurt me before I realized he was doing me more harm than he was good? But in my head, I was thinking he only had one more year of college left before he was home for good. I didn’t want to think of why he doubled his courses to graduate a year early. I thought that maybe that would impact how the end of our summer would go. It didn’t. I not only lost Killian once again, I lost all my friends because of it, and my parents were sick of dealing with my depression over him. His college senior year was the worst year I could possibly ever have in a lifetime. I was more than alone. I was invisible to everyone. The only two people to speak to me were my parents, and even that, I believe, was out of obligation. My own customers didn’t utter words to me unless they were telling me what they wanted to order. I couldn’t believe it. I grew up with all of these people, and they treated me as if I were a leper.

I had absolutely no one to talk to. My best friend still wanted nothing to do with me and repeatedly reminded me that, until I was completely clear of Killian, she was done with me. Looking back on everything, I probably shouldn’t say that it was the worst year of my life, for a couple of reasons. One, I was still young, and two, that is the year that Duncan and I started to speak. Only then did I find out what truly happened with the ball, and when I did, I was beyond angry. If I hadn’t fallen for that one tiny, stupid lie, I wouldn’t be in the mess that I’m still in to this day. If I had just listened to Duncan, maybe my life would be completely different, and I wouldn’t be this useless, recently graduated, high school student who was stuck in this godforsaken town and addicted to the wrong kind of substance.

As the weeks grew closer to Killian’s graduation, my nerves began to show, and Duncan noticed. Even though he never said he pitied me, I could see it in his eyes. I was so sure I wouldn’t fall for anymore of his bullshit. I had finally had enough. I knew that he used Duncan as a ploy to snatch me up and ruin me forever.

But the moment Killian walked into my family’s café, I was done for, just like every other time. He waited for me to finish yelling at him about the ball incident. He said it was no big deal, but to me, it was. If I had known the truth, it might have saved me all of this pain and sorrow.

Duncan was beyond pissed off. I couldn’t figure out why, and it hurt. He had been my only friend over the last year, and without him, I felt empty. We had forged this amazing friendship, and with Killian walking back into my life, it smashed it all to hell. When I confronted Duncan about his attitude, his bad mood evaporated, and he gave me this smile that would make any woman want to drop to her knees to serve him. His plan was absolutely brilliant and made me blush from my toes to the tips of my ears. Play Killian at his own game. Date both of them. It seemed like a simple logical thing to do. When I started laughing, he took that moment to be serious and say that he had waited years for me to be free of Killian, and that this was the first time he thought he might have a chance against him. I thought long and hard about what he said, and it all made sense. My body craved the man that fed this crazy addiction laced inside my body, and yet my soul… my soul screamed and cried out for Duncan, the man who waited five years for me to beat my addiction that is Killian. Why else would I have been so distraught over Duncan being angry with me? I may have been lonely, but the root of the problem was that my feeling for him had grown.

That was the day Duncan became my absolution. If anyone could break this hold Killian had over me, it was Duncan. And I was going to do everything I could to make sure I fell completely and utterly for Duncan, and leave Killian behind in the dust, just as he had done to me all these years.

Meeting Duncan

My senior year of high school started with a bang and ended with me in a slump, and it was all because of Emery fucking Hadley. One look at that girl, and I was done. Not even the blood gushing down her face from Killian hitting her with a dodge ball could distract me from her beauty. I had seen her more times than I could count before then, but that one damn day, she sold my soul to her own reaper.

Her brown hair sat in a pile on top of her head and she wore her volleyball uniform, equipped with all the padding, and yet, she still stole my breath away. It was insane to me how a fourteen-year-old girl could hold so much power over me. I found myself creating fantasies in my head about marrying her one day as I stood there like an idiot while she bled all over the place.

It wasn’t until Killian started blaming me for hitting her in the face with the ball that I snapped out of my daydreams. I was pissed beyond belief. That little fucker was my best friend, and yet he was telling her that it was my fault. That it was me that bloodied her beautiful face. The asshole had it coming, whether he knew it at the time or not. Before I could even process what had happened, he took her hand in his and walked towards the hall to take her to the nurse’s office.

That day, our friendship ended. I couldn’t explain it back then, but I can now. He walked away with the girl who had ripped my very soul from me. It was gone just like that, and I wanted revenge.

I’m not proud of the things I have done over the past few years to do just that, but what’s done is done and there isn’t anything I can do about it now.

If Emery were to find out about some of those things, I am sure she wouldn’t be agreeing to date both me and Killian at the same time. She’d most likely tell me to fuck off and she’d continue her obsession with him in peace, away from me. It makes my stomach tie up in knots thinking about all those girls I pushed towards him and what Emery might do if she found out.

Killian was oblivious to it all because I was away in college for my first year when I put my plan in motion. He probably thought because I was gone, he was now the big man at school.

The first time I sent a girl to him was the first time that Emery had caught them. Talk about having good luck. It couldn’t have gone better if I had been there myself coaxing them together. I already know all of this makes me the world’s biggest fucking asshole and I don’t give a shit. I vowed to make his life a living hell until I am completely and utterly satisfied and I have what I want.

So I continued to work my magic from college and watched Killian destroy the one good thing he will ever probably have in his life.

Did it rip me all up knowing that she was falling apart? Yes, it made me feel like the piece of shit asshole that I am, but even though I felt like that, I still wanted her.

Selfish. That is what I am.

I claim to be madly in love with this girl and yet I continued to find reasons to ruin her and Killian. You would think if I loved her, I would at least want her to be happy. But if I couldn’t be with her, I definitely didn’t want her with someone like Killian. He was a bigger manipulating ass than I was. It takes one asshole to know another and I see his true colors. I got his number all figured out. Do I still deserve to win Emery over even though I helped cause the pain she has experienced over the years? Yes. I wasn’t the one that stuck my dick repeatedly into the other girls when I already had a girlfriend. I may have dangled the prey in front of him, but he is the one that chomped down on it like the hungry lion he is. He acted on pure lust and didn’t care that he already had everything he could possibly want. He had love. He had Emery.

As for me and my life, being one of the Walkers in Walker Creek, Montana isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Things are expected of me and my actions speak a lot louder than other people’s might. Maybe if I wasn’t worried about what my parents might have thought about me dating Emery, I would have made a move sooner. I might’ve spoken up years ago and saved all three of us from this chaotic mess. I’m definitely not one to back down from a challenging situation, but going against my parents is like taking on an entire football team loaded down with steroids. But I am so fucking done trying to please them. I went to the college of their choosing and now I’m back under their thumb working for our family business. We own a shit ton of mines and land. Right now I am basically their bitch boy. Running back and forth from job sites to job sites and sitting behind a mountain of paperback that bores the ever living shit out of me. They own me and it makes me physically ill. Not once has a Walker child ever been able to leave and do what they want. Even my cousins are stuck working for my aunts and uncles. Our family is obsessed with keeping our name the elite family of Walker Creek and this act is downright fucking exhausting.