“I’m fine, Alex.” She looked over his shoulder and saw Reese watching her with his emotions so raw and tangible she couldn’t stop the flow of tears. His nose and mouth were bloody, he held his side as if in pain, and a bruise was starting to form on his cheek.
God, Alex had beaten the shit out of him.
“Keira.” Reese’s voice was strained, and he cleared it before talking again. “If you’ll just talk to me, let me explain.”
“There isn’t anything to talk about, asshole. I may not know what you did, but you hurt my sister, and that makes you my problem,” Alex growled.
Reese closed his eyes and grimaced. “Please, Keira. Just give me five minutes. I can clear the air about what you think happened.”
She knew this needed to be resolved now. Pulling away from Alex, she looked up at her brother. “I’ll be okay. I need to do this, and I’d like some privacy.”
He shook his head. “I’m not leaving you alone with him.” He cut a nasty glare at Reese before looking at her again.
“Alex, I’ll be fine. Just give me a few minutes alone, okay?”
It took her brother several moments to agree, and when he went back in the house, she felt the weight of the awkwardness hanging in the air.
And this was where the moment of truth spilled forth. And she feared it would break her all over again.
31
Reese’s expression grew more torn the longer he stood there and stared at her. “Keira….” He didn’t say anything else, maybe trying to decide what he was going to say. She stood there and let him take his time.
She wanted this resolved so she could start to move on if need be.
“I know what you think you saw me doing in those pictures, but I swear it isn’t what they seem.” He took another step, and she shook her head, causing him to stop advancing.
His nostrils flared, and he ground his teeth before continuing. “I know it looked like I fucked up, holding that girl, maybe even kissing her…” He shook his head, the sound of his teeth gnashing together seeming loud around them. “But I swear on everything, Keira, I did not do any of that shit.” He exhaled roughly. “She was drunk, lost her footing. I reached out before she crashed into me. Someone snapped the pictures, and how it looks sure as shit isn’t what went down.”
Keira dropped her gaze to the ground and closed her eyes. He sounded so sincere, and she couldn’t help but believe him. How could she not when he’d made her feel so good every time she was with him, when he’d said things she never envisioned someone would say to her?
“Baby, you have to believe me.” He sounded closer, and she lifted her head and looked at him. His emotions were out in the open, cut like glass, severe and raw.
She thought about what was going on, what the plans were… for the future. Maybe this was the wakeup call she needed, a clean break before she started college, before she got too deep with Reese nothing else made sense.
“Reese, what are we doing?” she whispered, seeing the way confusion filtered across his face, how his eyebrows pulled down to intensify the look.
“What are you talking about? I know what we’re doing, and I thought you did too. I felt it from you, Keira.” He moved closer, and she didn’t retreat. “You believe me. I can see in your eyes that you know I’d never do anything to hurt you. I’d never fucking risk it.”
“Reese, have you thought about what will happen when we graduate and I go to college?”
A hard look crossed his face.
She looked in his face, saw the sincerity, heard it in his voice. She believed him about the pictures, how they weren’t what she thought. That was easy. What wasn’t so easy was the reality that this would have never worked. There would have been someone or something that got in their way, shoved them apart. They were so different, and it wasn’t even about money or social status. It was about her plans for the future, what Reese wanted to do with his life.
It was so much more than what they were doing now.
But she decided to put him out of his misery about one problem before moving fully onto the next. “I believe you, Reese. I don’t think you would do anything to hurt me.” The relief she saw wash across his face had her heart aching.
“Good, because I’d rather cut off my own arm than ever hurt you.” He took another step closer.
Her chest clenched tighter, harder. Her heart hurt even more. He stopped right in front of her but didn’t make a move to touch her. She didn’t think she could have handled it if he touched her, not with her tremulous emotions. She would have said forget the reality of their situation. She would have fallen into his arms and begged him to be with her.
“God, the thought that I almost lost you, that you wouldn’t be in my life….” He shook his head, that anguish in his expression back full force, as if the very thought of not being with her was too much to even think about. “I can’t explain why people do the things they do, why they want to start shit and rumors, destroy something good in people's lives, but fuck them. They don’t know what we have. They don’t know how I feel about you.”
She couldn’t help it. She started crying.
“Keira, baby, I swear that everything will be okay. We are stronger than this, than everyone who wants to ruin us because they don’t think we should be together, because they want to fuck up and ruin what we have.”
She shook her head slowly. “Reese, this is bigger than the
