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The moment Brant turned, in that Belize hotel bar, at 1:43 AM, I knew something was wrong. I just couldn't place what. I couldn't figure out why the hairs on my arm stood up. I couldn't figure out why the noise of the bar suddenly seemed to fade. I stood there, stared at him, and tried to place the problem.
"Hey." He grinned. A wide grin that showed his dimple and white teeth and spoke of carefree games of football on Saturday nights. When he smiled, his eyes carried the gesture, crinkling at the edges, creating the effect of a man who knew his charm and carried it easily. "You look lost, sweetheart." He reached forward, cupped the edge of my elbow and tugged me closer. Reflexively, I held up my hand, touching his shirt, pushing on it without any force. I was just trying to stop my forward motion while allowing my mind to sort what about this situation felt wrong. My gaze flicked right, to a polo-wearing blonde perched on the closest stool, whose outfit screamed resort employee, her hand gripped around the neck of a beer that I'm pretty sure she wasn't old enough to drink. His other hand, the one not dragging me into his space, was resting on her bare thigh. I stared at that hand and wondered why he didn't move it.
"Honey." He raised his voice, trying to get my attention and my attention snapped up to his face, that wide smile still there, his eyes on me. He’d called me honey.Honey. That was a word I'd never heard roll off his lips. I looked back at his hand and watched as his fingers moved, caressing her thigh. As Ifuckingwatched.
I ripped my gaze from the sight, taking it back to him, my eyes raking every surface of his face, looking for clues. Was he high? Pupils normal. Drunk? Didn't really look it. He looked normal. If normal had a face that looked nothing like Brant. If normal looked flirtatious and easy-going, like a man who had friends and watched sports. Like a man whose hand was moving further up blonde tennis chick's leg.
I pushed hard against his chest and snapped my fingers at the girl. "You. Get out of here before I have you fired." She blinked and looked at Brant, then back at me. I didn't wait for a response, I turned to Brant and prepared to give him a full helping of every pissed off emotion in my body.
His face tripped my tyrannical plans. It was irritated, and he reached out and grabbed the shoulder of the blonde, pushing her back down on the stool when she went to stand. "Stay, Summer," he said under his breath, and I reached a level of pissed off that I had never experienced.Summer?He rose to his feet, towering above my height in the hotel slippers. "Miss, you should probably be the one to leave."
Miss? I gawked at him. If Honey had thrown me off, Miss kicked me into next week. I avoided looking to my right, hating the feel of the blonde's eyes as my boyfriend made a complete ass of me.
"Miss?" I sputtered. "What the fuck's wrong with you?"
He shook his head, and glanced around at the people beside him, as if I was the crazy one in this situation. He stepped closer to me and lowered his voice as he tilted his head down and stared directly into my furious glare. "Did I miss something? Did I do something to you without realizing it?" His eyes dropped, and I flushed for a quick moment when I realized he was staring at the sheer fabric of my top, the robe gaping open enough for him to see cleavage. I stepped back, wrapping the robe tighter, my mouth working, my hand thrusting his cell phone out, incoherent thought manifesting itself into speech, anger in the form of words, spilling out.
"I don't know what kind of sick game you're playing, Brant, but we are through. Take your cell and get your own fucking room."
"Brant?" His eyebrows met in a way that I'd never seen but was incredibly hot. The image almost distracted me from the next line of bullshit out of his mouth. "My name isn't Brant."
My name isn't Brant. The most idiotic sentence that, I could guarantee, had ever come out of that man's brilliant mouth. I laughed. "Your name isn't Brant?"
"No." He said it with such certainty that, for a minute, I thought I might be the crazy one after all. "You have me mistaken for someone else." He held out a hand as if I would have any interest in shaking it. "Who areyou?"
The night had left Crazytown behind. I blinked at him and understood nothing except that everything was broken.
* * *
"You know my name," I whispered.
He tilted his head in a gesture of recollection, then shook his head. "No. Sorry. Have we met?"
I glanced from his innocent face to the blonde, her brows raised in an expression that indicated her impression of my sanity. Then my gaze traveled over the crowd, everyone’s perplexed pity fixed on one common source: me. Not Brant, who appeared to be in the middle of a nervous breakdown.
I crossed my arms and pinched my skin, just north of my ribs, just to make sure I wasn't dreaming. I wasn't.
Brant's cell was still in my hand and, without a word, I slipped it into my pocket, turned, and fled the bar.
Hot tears slipped down my face. I veered at the sight of a stairwell door and pushed it open, then sat on the first step of the flight. My composure lasted until the door shut and then I broke down in the privacy of the stairwell.
Wasthisthe end of us? Not Jillian, not an affair, or a fight … instead this insane middle of the night confrontation with a man who didn't know my name?
I stopped rocking and tried to think, logically, through this. I analyzed his face, his reactions. The words, my instincts. I had believed the words that came out of his mouth—or rather, believed that he believed them. It was what had made the entire scene maddening. But if he believed the words he had spoken, if he believed that he didn't know me, believed that he wasn't Brant....
Was this the secret? If so, it meant it was real. That this wasn’t a blip of abnormality but a ... lifestyle. A forever. I pulled out my phone, dialed Jillian's number, and damned the consequences.
She answered on the last ring before I lost my nerve to voicemail.
"Hello?" Her voice had aged, or maybe it was just the fact that it was almost three in the morning.
I cleared my throat. "It's Layana Fairmont."
"I have caller ID. I'm well aware of who you are."
"I just ... Brant ... he was downstairs in the hotel bar. And he didn't recognize me." I closed my eyes and hoped that those sentences made sense. This was the test. She would either know exactly what I was saying or jump to the conclusion that I had driven my boyfriend insane. Which, from where I was sitting, was still a fairly good possibility.
Her sigh told me everything I needed to know. It wasn't surprised or irritated. It was resigned. Expectant.
