But it was too late for starting over. I still couldn’t make Sloan safe. Not unless the public was suddenly more interested in buying magazines with pictures of me and her in them instead of me and Lola. And I’d done my job too well. Ernie said she hated me, that he couldn’t even mention my name without her face going hard. She was dating. She was moving on.

The damage had been done.

Chapter 45

Sloan

? Proof | Jaxon Waters

Adrian had two hands behind his back. “Pick one.” He smiled and his green eyes creased at the corners. We were sitting in a steakhouse waiting on appetizers.

Adrian held open doors for me. He pulled out my chair and ordered me a glass of wine that he seemed to know a lot about. He was funny, charming, and engaging. Intelligent, successful, and attractive. And he was trying very hard to show me a good time.

It totally wasn’t working. I couldn’t stop thinking about Zane’s letter.

Adrian waited for me to pick a hand. I pointed unenthusiastically to the left one. He put a full-size bottle of vanilla creamer on the table in front of me. I cracked a small smile. We’d stopped at the gas station on the way over and he’d caught me putting a few single-serve creamers in my purse.

“Smooth,” Kristen said from across the table. “But she likes the little ones.”

He smiled. “Well, I can’t help you there.”

Kristen kicked my shin under the table.

Adrian was flirting with me. Hard.

And I. Felt. Nothing.

If the complete and total lack of butterflies in my stomach wasn’t depressing enough, I kept looking at the clock. One hour until Jason’s show. I felt like I was going to burst into tears. The moments that he was in town were ticking down before my eyes. Running out like sand in an hourglass. And instead of being where he was, I was on a date with someone amazing who couldn’t even hold my attention because I was too damaged and in love with somebody else to even entertain it.

“Excuse me.” I got up. “I need to use the ladies’ room.”

Kristen’s chair raked against the floor as she got up to follow me. As soon as the door closed behind us she pounced on me. “Damn, that dude wants to eat you alive. I think you should let him.”

“And I think you need to see this,” I said. I dug in my purse and pulled out the letter. I unfolded it, handed it to her, and watched with my arms crossed as she read it.

The longer she looked at it, the deeper her frown got. “Oh my God…” She looked up at me. “Do you believe what she said?”

I sniffed and nodded. “She wouldn’t lie. And the Lola thing never felt right. That’s why I came back to his hotel room that day. There was something off about it from the very beginning. Why would he lie about it, though?”

She pursed her lips. “I don’t know, Sloan. Maybe he had to lie to you to break up with you. I mean, you know how you are.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “How am I?”

She shrugged. “You don’t like to get rid of things that aren’t good for you. You know this. Brandon’s stuff, your shitty car, your dilapidated house? You don’t exactly have a history of making rational, sensible life choices. You’re sentimental to a fault. You’ve always been that way and I bet Jason knew that.”

My chin started to shake.

“Maybe he knew you wouldn’t take his logical reasoning for whatever it was, and he needed to do something extra. Because let’s be honest, what he did was really fucking extra.”

I leaned over the sink and snatched a paper towel out of the dispenser. “So what’s your theory, then?” I asked, blowing my nose.

“I don’t know. But my gut tells me that dude fell on a sword. If Zane is saying he’s all fucked up and she thinks you should see him…I don’t know. Even Josh is giving him the benefit of the doubt, and you know Josh.”

I sniffled. “Really?”

“Yeah. You know what he said that really got me?” She crossed her arms. “When I came back from visiting you in Ely and I told him how in love Jason’s parents were, he said he could tell that’s what Jason came from. That Jason was a guy, just like him, who grew up in a small town seeing two parents ridiculously in love with each other. Guys like Josh and Jason don’t do shit like this. It’s not how they were raised. It’s not in their DNA. They mate for life. They fall in love and they worship the ground that woman walks on. They don’t cheat and they don’t fucking leave. If Jason left, he had a reason.”

I mopped at my nose. “Maybe the fame finally changed him.”

She scoffed. “Do you really believe that? Come on.”

No, I didn’t believe that. I didn’t know what to believe.

“So what are we doing?” she asked. “Going to see him? Beating the shit out of that pi?ata? Double-dating? What?”

Jason didn’t want to be with me. He didn’t want to see me.

But it didn’t change the fact that I wanted to see him.

I was almost angrier with myself about this than I was at him for breaking me in half. But I did. I wanted to see him.

Not up close. Not one-on-one. But in a crowd, where he wouldn’t know I was there?