Page 27 of Fake It For Him

Calan let out a dry chuckle, running one of his hands into his hair but the motion wasn’t nearly as aggravated this time. It even kind of looked like he was only doing it to give his hand something to do. The other was gripping the windowsill tight, his knuckles and the beds of his nails white from the force.

“On the night of the stag party and bachelorette parties, everyone was partying. We started separately, but we ended up at the same club.” He closed his eyes, his strong chest rising on a deep inhale. “We were all fucked up, so drunk that we could barely see straight. She came onto me on the dance floor and we hooked up.”

This time, even though I’d known what to expect, I was even more stunned than before. He’d slept with his brother’s fiancée on the night of his brother’s bachelor party. While the bachelor party had still been happening even.

Okay, I take back everything I thought before. He’s not really human. He’s just a player. What. An. Asshole!

“There’s more to it than just that, but those are the highlights. It’s complicated, though.”

I shook my head. “No, it’s not. Not really. You betrayed your brother in one of the worst ways possible and so did she. That’s why they want you to have a date so badly, isn’t it? They don’t trust you at your sister’s wedding.”

“It’s not like I’m going to fuck the groom.” He snorted. “Honestly, I don’t know why they’re making me bring a date, but that’s not really the issue here. Finn is.”

“He’s not, though. You’re the issue. They think you’re going to use her wedding as an opportunity to get laid and they don’t want you slutting around on your sister’s big day.”

He grimaced, and I wondered why this was striking a nerve. Everything I knew about him suggested that he was a shallow jerk, to the extent that he’d screwed his brother’s fiancée and pretended that he’d been some kind of hero for doing it.

So why did it look like I just saw regret and guilt in his eyes? Shame, even?

“It’s true, though, isn’t it? That is why they’re insisting on you having a date?”

He nodded. “None of them get that I did it for him. I thought they were coming around, but clearly, they’re not.”

I scoffed. “How did sleeping with his fiancée save him from making a mistake? Do you honestly believe that you did it for him somehow? Because that’s messed up, Calan. Really messed up.”

“No, it’s not,” he said quietly, glancing out the window before he turned back to me. “Like I said, it’s more complicated than it seems.”

Before he could shut down on me again, I decided to press the issue. For starters, because he and I needed to have this conversation if we were going to make it to the wedding unscathed by this history, but also because that meant that not long after he’d slept with her, he’d slept with me too.

And I needed to know.

Thank God for condoms. But since it’d been four years, I wasn’t worried about having gotten something from him.

This was for me.

For my own peace of mind.

“No, don’t do that,” I said firmly. “Don’t just give me some generic bullshit about there being more to the story. What else is there, Calan? Because right now, from where I’m standing, you’re the asshole. Not Finn.”

“I saved him from making the mistake of spending the rest of his life with someone who didn’t love him.”

I shook my head again. “How do you know she didn’t love him? It’s one thing to say that, but you slept with her just as surely as she slept with you, and he’s your brother. You love him regardless. Why couldn’t the same have been true for her?”

“Because Edinburgh wasn’t the first time she tried to have sex with me,” he said matter-of-factly. “You also weren’t there when it was happening, Ella. It’s one thing to be up on your high horse now, after the fact, judging me, but you didn’t hear the things she said to me when she was trying to seduce me.”

“Trying? It sounds to me like she succeeded.” And like you’re a cocky asshole who deserves every drop of shit you’re getting from your brother.

Calan fell silent, simply staring back at me. I shook my head at him again. “Wow. You really are a cocky asshole, aren’t you?”

None of this even sounded like real life to me, which probably meant that every word of it was true, but still. The fact that he still couldn’t face the fact that he had been one of the parties in the wrong, that he was still justifying his actions and shrugging them off as having somehow done his brother a favor, spoke volumes about him.

Since he seemed to be done justifying his actions, I turned and headed to the kitchen. I needed some time to process what all this meant as far as it related to me and our relationship. I was hardly in a position to walk away from that kind of money based on the knowledge that I had the moral high ground, which probably meant my moral high ground wasn’t very high after all, but still.

I needed to wrap my head around it all and figure out how to go about being his girlfriend, knowing what I did now. As I was putting on the kettle to make a cup of tea, he came up behind me. I heard his footsteps approaching, but I didn’t turn to look at him, and the next thing I knew, he wasn’t just behind me, he was right there.

So close that his chest brushed against my back with every breath one of us took. He brushed my hair from the back of my neck, hanging it over one of my shoulders as he leaned in closer to speak softly in my ear.

“Haven’t you ever done something bad that you couldn’t take back, Ella?” His voice was husky and low, but it was also coarse with emotion, so heavy that he seemed almost hoarse.