Bad Wedding: A Bad Boy Romance Read Free Page B

Five years. More than a fifth of my life. The idea felt like a slap to the face, and my anger drained out of me like a deflated balloon. Jason was right; this was exhausting. I wasn’t the kind of girl who hated people for five years. In fact, I didn’t hate anyone—Jason was the only one. He was the only person on the planet who made me this certifiably insane.
    And suddenly, I wanted him to understand the reason. I didn’t want to keep it to myself anymore, like a closely held secret. I wanted him to know. I wanted it to matter.
    Doug was a few feet away, straightening a shelf of breath mints and lip glosses, and I turned to him. “I’m taking a break.”
    He looked at me and frowned. The old man waiting to pay for his Eno frowned, too. “It’s not time for your break,” Doug said.
    There was an arcane system dictating who took breaks when that I had never bothered to understand, but Doug knew it by heart. “I’m taking it now,” I said, untying my apron and sliding the loop up over my head.
    “Fine,” Doug huffed, not wanting to make a scene in front of the Eno man. “But you can’t take your break at one forty-five.”
    I dropped the apron. Jason was getting away with every second wasted here. “Whatever. I’ll be right back.”
    I stepped out the front door. Drug-Rite was in a strip mall, and past the concrete overhang I could see that it was still raining hard. Jason was walking along the walkway, heading toward his car, which was parked in front of the pet food store four doors down.
    “Jason,” I said, trotting after him.
    He went tense; I could see it in the line of his shoulders beneath the sweatshirt. He still had his hood up, and when he turned and looked at me, his eyes were guarded, his mouth set. “Yeah?” he said.
    I had to swallow my fear for a second. It wasn’t just that standing face to face like this, without a counter between us, I was aware of how much taller than me he was. It wasn’t just that he was gorgeous, or that he’d been a god in high school. It wasn’t just that he made me aware of the dampness between my legs as I stood there looking at him.
    It was that, once upon a time, I had seen Jason Carsleigh naked. All the way naked. And every time I looked at him now I kept seeing it, over and over, like some crazy oversexed version of erotic PTSD. The ridges of his stomach. The dark tufts of hair under his arms. The lines of muscles along his thighs. The easy curve of his lower back. His cock. All of it. All of it.
    The blank look on his face told me he wasn’t faking. He didn’t remember.
    “The year after high school,” I blurted at him. “Penny Smith threw a party at her dad’s house.”
    His dark brown eyes watched me, something ticking behind them. But he didn’t speak.
    “You were there,” I said. “With Dean. He was doing shots in the kitchen. You were in the basement rec room, going through Penny’s dad’s movie collection and drinking vodka.”
    The lines of Jason’s face changed subtly. His eyes went wider. His jaw went harder. He blinked once, and I watched the memories come up behind his pupils. “Wait,” he said softly.
    “You’d had a lot of vodka,” I said. “And you were talking to a girl. The two of you were making jokes about the lame old VHS tapes on the shelves. All those terrible old 1980’s movies. You were laughing with her. She drank some of your vodka, and then some more. And then somehow everyone else left the basement, and you were alone with her. And the two of you started kissing, and making out, and there was a spare unused bedroom down the hall in the basement, and…”
    I saw the second it happened. I watched it dawn over Jason’s face, a trickle of memory at first, and then more. And then knowledge, unmistakable, accompanied by something that looked like pure terror.
    “Oh, no,” he said.
    “Yeah,” I said, the words coming hard from my throat, my anger gone. “Yeah. Jason. That girl was me.”

Three
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