Jon circled the block a few times to blow off some steam, then parked the Aston Martin at the end of Erin’s street. He might be angry, he might have hated everything she told him, and he might have needed to get out of her house and be alone for awhile, but that didn’t mean he didn’t care about her safety. If that creep Max so much as dared to show his face around the neighborhood, he’d regret it instantly.
Jon shut off the headlights and sat back in the driver’s seat, crossing his arms tightly over his chest. His jaw was locked, his eyes hard, as he stared at the dark street in front of him. His head was spinning with thoughts and emotions coming at him from every angle – anger, disbelief, surprise…
Love.
He’d been side-blinded and thrown off balance when Erin told him about Max. He’d sat there while she poured out her heart in apology, and tried desperately to absorb the reality of the information while questions raged in his brain. Why is she telling me now? He’d thought. In the middle of the night?
Because the guy had been outside her house. “Watching her. Waiting for her.”
Jon didn’t like that fact one single bit. What was the creep doing watching her in the middle of the night? Why had he taken up stalking her? Was he just a disgruntled ex, or did Erin have some other secrets she wasn’t telling Jon?
He got that was why she called him, he got that she was scared…but the way she dropped all that crap on him, with so much more to the story, really got under his skin. Like she was trying to side-blind him, get him under the pretense of a bigger, more important story than the fact that she’d cheated on him.
Last month. She had been involved with another guy until last month. It was one thing if she and Jon had just met and she’d told him about Max right then…but last month? Three months into their relationship?
Jon cringed as he remembered making love to her, setting up a romantic evening at his house, admitting to her that he loved her….shit. His face burned as he felt insanely foolish; he’d been a blithering idiot. Entirely blind to her two faces, unaware that as he confessed his love to her that night she was hiding a secret relationship with another man. His stomach churned with a mixture of humiliation and fury.
Then again, Jon realized, what if she had told him about Max right away? Or what if she’d been straight with him from that first moment they met on the plane? Everything would have been different. Jon never would have known her. They would have gotten off that plane and gone their separate ways, and she never would have made that impression on him that she did when he had his driver take her home. When he watched her walk up to her door and thought about the inspiration she had given him for a song.
She would have become nothing more than that – a character in some future lyrics.
So what did that all mean? That this was the price of getting to know her after all? That because she simply answered something else to that question on the plane, they’d ended up talking all night, he’d helped her get her luggage back, taken her home, decided to follow her in when he saw her at Starbucks a week later, became instantly wrapped up in the excitement and passion of a new romance, and ended up falling for her. Hard.
It seemed as though everything had transpired because of a lie. And as much as he hated to consider it, Jon couldn’t help but feel as though the whole thing, the whole past four months, had been a lie itself.
But the other part of him knew he was overreacting. It wasn’t as though she’d known that night what was going to happen. She, just like he, was in the middle of a situation that she’d never foreseen – immersed in an atmosphere that lent itself to slight manipulation of the truth. They had been perfect strangers, after all. Thrust together by happenchance. Neither of them even considering the fact – at the time – that they’d ever see each other again.
When he thought of it that way, her lie seemed so insignificant.
But then why, after they’d gotten to know each other, after they’d gotten involved, after they’d gotten physical for Christ’s sake, why hadn’t she told him then?
Despite his eagerness to accuse her, to find fault on her side, Jon knew the answer to that as well. He was only human.
So how could he be angry with her? He was no saint himself, in fact, he was probably the biggest hypocrite in the world for preaching about fidelity.
But damn it, he had never cheated on her. He hadn’t even thought about it.
And strangely enough, Jon realized as he sat there deep in thought, that was the root of this whole problem. Why he was so angry. Because he was in love with Erin. Because she meant enough to him that he wasn’t even interested in other women, because she was amazing and beautiful and intelligent and wonderful enough to finally prove his match. She was worthy of his crazy, stubborn, hotheaded personality and unrelenting lifestyle, and every day she proved to show him something new about herself. About them. Teaching him that he’d never known love from this angle – at this depth.
To finally have found that ultimate match, that one woman who made all the women from his past obsolete, the final destination in that crazy, cosmic search for love…it was terrifying. Was she really “the one”? Jon didn’t know if he was ready for that.
And try as he might to play it off casually, as much as he insisted it wasn’t as big as it felt, he was downright terrified of the hold she had on his heart.
Jon rubbed his face agitatedly. That was what made it so much worse. Maybe he could understand why she hadn’t told him about Max, or Max about him, but the fact that she hadn’t broken things off with Max, the fact that she’d kept things going well into her and Jon’s new relationship…it hurt. More than Jon wanted to admit. It meant that she didn’t feel the same way about him, and if that was true, he was absolutely damned.
Admitting he was under her spell, in love to the point of almost no return was hard enough. But having to accept the fact that it wasn’t reciprocated…Jon suddenly understood the real reason for all of his mixed feelings that night.
And as he sat in the silent car, staring out at the darkened street, the lyrics from a song he’d written long ago stung at his heart…
If you don’t love me, lie to me
‘Cause baby you’re the one thing I believe
Let it all fall down around us, if that’s what meant to be
Right now, if you don’t love me, baby
Lie to me…
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