A mistake I made in a moment of weakness when I had been drinking and he had looked so handsome and I just wanted to forget everything that had already happened between us.
My body hadn’t gotten the memo that he was no longer available to us.
My mind knew that Beck Clermont was off-limits, but my body didn’t care.
I kicked an old bottle of water from the bleachers and took a bite of my sandwich. The bottle rolled and clanked loudly against the metal as it fell from step to step.
I hadn’t eaten lunch in the lunchroom ever since I had to hear the word slut or whore whispered under someone’s breath between each of my bites. It didn’t matter that Lucas had started sitting with me as if he actually gave a shit about me. None of them cared.
They didn’t fear Lucas as he wanted them to. As he expected them to.
He wasn’t Beck.
The bottle hit the bottom step and slowly rolled into the fence.
"That was unnecessary."
I looked up from my feet just as Cami took a seat on the bottom step. I had no idea what she was doing out here. The two of us had been avoiding each other since our run-in on my first day back, and I had no plans in talking to her now.
She may not have been the one to post the video of me, but she was just as bad as the rest of them. She was just as cruel.
"What do you want?" I was tired of tiptoeing around these people. If Cami was out here, it was because she wanted something, and I trusted her even less than I trusted Beck.
"I was just leaving the locker room, and I saw you sitting out here all alone." Regardless of what she wanted with Beck, one thing was absolutely certain. She wanted me nowhere near him.
"I really don’t have the energy for you today, Cami." I shoved my trash and the rest of my sandwich into my lunch bag and zipped up my backpack.
"I just wanted to say I’m sorry."
My gaze snapped to her because it was the absolute last thing I was expecting her to say. "What?"
She looked out to the baseball field then back at me. "I’m sorry." She shrugged her shoulders, and her blonde hair bounced with the movement.
"What exactly are you apologizing for?" I leaned forward and pressed my elbows to my knees. If I didn’t head back inside within the next few minutes, I was going to be late for my next class, but there was no way I was leaving now. Not until I heard what Cami had to say.
"For what he did." She blinked up at me, and I didn’t know if it was my own animosity toward her, but I could have sworn there wasn’t an ounce of remorse on her face. "I knew that he was planning to use it to get back at Lucas, but…" She hesitated, and I hated how on edge I felt. I was clinging to every word that passed her lips. "I never thought that he would take it this far."
I swallowed down the emotion that was threatening to drown me.
"Exactly how far did you think he was going to take it?"
"Honestly?" She turned so she was facing me more, and her uniform looked so pristine. Everything about her did. "I just thought he was going to use you to get under Lucas’s skin. I didn’t know he was going to post that
video. I didn’t realize the two of you were going to take things that far." Her eyes clouded over, and for a second, the feeling of regret washed over me.
Cami cared about Beck in whatever fucked up way the two of them allowed, and I had helped him cross a line that neither of us was meant to cross. He had planned to hurt me all along, but I also helped him hurt her.
It didn’t matter what he said about their relationship or lack thereof. I should have never gone there with him. I should have seen every red flag he waved in my face and ran the other way.
But I didn’t.
"He said that you two weren’t really a thing," I said the only thing I could think of. It was the truth, but it sounded so weak coming from my mouth. It sounded so damn shameful and full of complete and total shit.
Both of us knew it too.
"We aren’t what we used to be, but I didn’t think he would do this." She shook her head, and I actually felt sorry for her. "He’s just been so angry since Lucas."
I held my breath when she said his name, but she didn’t go further. She searched my face for whatever she was looking for, and I knew that I was giving it to her. There was no way that I could hide my emotions at that moment. Not after everything that happened with Beck this weekend, not after I kissed him again after what he had done. Now, here I sat facing her, and I knew that I should probably be the one apologizing.
"What happened between him and Lucas?" I asked the question I had been dying to know the answer to. The true answer. Not some bullshit from either one of them.
She opened her mouth, and I stopped her. "The truth, Cami. I can’t handle any more lies."
She nodded her head as she bit down on her bottom lip. "Beck and Lucas used to be close. All of us did."
"And what happened?"
She shook her head, and I felt like I was going to scream if she didn’t tell me. I had enough of all of their games. I wanted the truth. I needed it, and I didn’t care if she didn’t want to tell me.
I didn’t care if the truth hurt her somehow.
"It was Frankie. Beck and I had left a party to head back to my house."
She looked up at me, and I knew that she was watching me for a reaction.
And I gave it to her. I couldn’t help it. Just hearing about her and Beck
together did something to my chest that I didn’t want to think about.
But I couldn’t stop myself from caring about him.
"Beck let Frankie stay because Lucas was there. He had trusted him. He has always been so overprotective with her, and if he hadn’t trusted Lucas with his life, he would have never let her stay."
My stomach tightened with each word she spoke, and I knew that I didn’t want to hear the rest of it. Even if I needed to know the truth, I knew the truth of what happened to Frankie would be much harder to deal with than my own reality.
If what Beck said was true, I didn’t know how I would deal with it.
Right now, I could bury my head in the sand, but once Cami told me what really happened, I would no longer be able to hide from it.
"Frankie used to be obsessed with Lucas. Did you know that?"
I shook my head, but Beck had told me something similar when I found the video. He had said that Frankie had loved Lucas once, but the idea seemed so strange to me.
"She was. She had a crush on him since as long as I could remember. It always seemed harmless, but I think it was becoming more than a crush for her. I think that she really felt something for him, you know?"
She didn’t wait for me to respond. She looked so lost in her own thoughts as if she was so vividly remembering what she told me.
"After Beck left my house that night, he went home, but Frankie wasn’t there. Beck went back to the party to look for her and found her passed out drunk on the couch. She was a mess.
She was so drunk and her clothes and hair were a mess. I wasn’t there, but I heard that Lucas and Beck got into it. Beck was so pissed that Lucas had let her drink that much and just lay there for anyone to bother her. But Lucas didn’t care. They got into it pretty bad, and Lucas told him that he wasn’t Frankie’s protector."
I thought about when I had gone to a party with Lucas myself. I was his stepsister, and he had dropped me like I didn’t even matter. I couldn’t imagine trusting him with someone that I cared about. Not when he was out partying and drinking himself.
Regardless of who Lucas was or wasn’t, he was still just a teenage boy who made stupid decisions. That didn’t mean that he was a monster. Letting Frankie get drunk didn’t mean that he was guilty of all the things that Beck had claimed.