How could I love someone who could hurt me so easily?
It didn’t make any sense.
I knew that I felt something for him, I knew that I had been a fool, but saying out loud that I had thought I had loved her brother made me feel so idiotic. I wasn’t like her. Beck hadn’t been my friend before. I hadn’t known him for years.
From the moment I met Beck, I knew he didn’t like me. He didn’t like me, but I still fell for him. He had shown that he hated me, but I still gave him parts of me that I had never given to anyone else.
I shifted on my feet, and by the way Frankie watched me, I knew that she knew I was uncomfortable with what she said. She had been so brave, to admit that she had once loved someone who had hurt her the way Lucas had, I couldn’t imagine having that much strength.
I couldn’t imagine the amount of strength it took for her to get up in the morning and come to school and face him all day. For her to pretend as though nothing happened. That thought alone had my blood boiling inside of my veins.
Lucas had hurt her in unspeakable ways, and he suffered no consequences.
Simply because he was my father’s stepson. My father had gotten him out of things that he should’ve paid for. It didn’t matter that his own freedom was what afforded Beck his. It should’ve never been on the table. My father should’ve made Lucas pay for what he did. If he protected him from the legal system, he should have punished him at home, but I knew that Lucas hadn’t had those consequences.
He had disappointed my father, and that was the extent of it. But in a way, I knew that that part alone had to fuck with Lucas’s head.
He was so desperate to impress him, so desperate to be just like him, and instead, he embarrassed him in front of all the people he ruled. Because, even though I knew what had happened and how they had decided to keep everything hush-hush, a place like Clermont Bay couldn’t keep secrets that tightly. Everybody whispered, everybody talked, and eventually everybody’s secrets would come out.
It hit me then that that was why my father wanted me to stay so far away from Beck. It wasn’t because of what he had done to Lucas. He could probably give two shits less about that. But Lucas had hurt his image, and he knew that Beck and his family were the only ones who had the power to keep that secret for them.
They were the ones who held the key to this particular set of sins.
He never actually cared about me, or what he thought the Clermonts were capable of. That was all a part of his act. The caring, loving father who wanted people to see him for everything he wasn’t.
And I knew it was irrational, but part of me thought he was just as guilty
as Lucas. I knew that was wrong, I knew that every bit of that was the deep-seated bitterness I had toward him, but I couldn’t stop myself from feeling it.
There wasn’t a thing I could do to change the way I felt.
"I know that what Beck did was wrong." Frankie leaned against his car and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. She looked nervous about what she would say to me next. Like she didn’t know how I would react. "But he does care about you."
I shook my head against her words. She saw Beck how she wanted to see him. She was his younger sister who loved him, and in her eyes, he could do no wrong.
He had been the one to protect her, to defend what had been taken from her, and I knew that she probably saw Beck as some sort of hero. I guess in her story, he was.
But he wasn’t in mine.
The way she felt about him wasn’t wrong, but she was wrong about this.
Beck may have wanted me, I was absolutely certain about that fact, but wanting someone and caring for someone are two different things.
They were incomparable.
Even if a small kernel of hope formed in my chest, I knew that I had to shut it down. I was already too naïve when it came to him, and I couldn’t afford for his little sister to make me believe anything other than what was right in front of me.
Beck had already shown me who he was, and it was time that I believed him.
"He doesn’t." I shook my head again. There is so much sympathy in her eyes that I had to look away. I didn’t need or want her sympathy even though I had given it to her.
Especially not from her.
"I know you don’t want to hear it, but he does. He’s just so fucked up in his own head right now."
Being fucked up in his head was nothing but an excuse. I understood why he did what he did. Why he felt the need.
Logically, I could make sense of his reasoning, but it didn’t mean that I would forgive it. He was fucked up in his head, but he still made a conscious decision to do what he did to me. He made a conscious decision to make me fall for him so that he could slap everything that I had done and said and hoped for right back in my face.
And even though I wanted to believe what she said, I wanted to believe it and cling to it and let everything else fall away, I knew that it would do nothing but end up getting me hurt.
Beck only led to one path, and I knew where that ended. Thinking anything else was insanity.
"I don’t…" I hesitated. "I don’t know that I’ll ever forgive him."
She stared at me for a few moments, and I knew that she understood what I was saying. But there was so much sympathy in her eyes, and I wasn’t sure whether it was meant for me or for her brother.
Because regardless of what he did to me, he was still her big brother, and I knew that she was going to have his back. But another part of me knew that she wouldn’t have said what she just said if she didn’t feel it was true.
Frankie seemed so far from fake, and I knew she hated the position that Beck and put me in.
She loved him, but she still hated what he had done.
She opened her mouth to say something else just as someone walked in front of Beck’s car. My spine straightened as I heard the footsteps move closer to us, and I wanted to run away as fast as I could.
I didn’t want to see him.
I didn’t need him catching me here with his sister, especially after everything we had just done. I didn’t need to give him any ammunition or time to mess with my head.
I just needed to get as far away from him as I could and to stay there.
But it wasn’t Beck who rounded the hood of his expensive SUV, it was Olly, and when he looked up and saw me, I saw that same sympathy staring back at me that Frankie had shown. Regardless of how hard Olly acted when he was with his boys, I could see how much he hated what Beck had done from that one look alone.
"Hey." He gently knocked his shoulder into Frankie, and I watched a blush fill her cheek. "Hey, Josie." He nodded his head toward me, and I tighten my hands on my backpack straps.
"Hi." I took a step back, ready to retreat from him. He may not have been Beck, but I had no interest in being around any of them. It didn’t matter if he felt bad for what had happened.
Olly and Carson were his best friends, and I knew that they had known what he was going to do. They had known, they had watched, and I felt so foolish standing in front of him.
All I could think about was that night the three of them had come to the country club. How badly Beck had treated me. Olly and Carson had watched him do so, then he watched me fall for him anyway.
He had to think that I was a complete and total idiot. That I was nothing more than a desperate girl who couldn’t walk away from Beck even when he had been pushing me.