“I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell anyone,” Jared choked out harshly. “All she knew is that I left the party without her daughter. There were plenty of friends who saw me leave. There were only three people who knew what really happened, why I left when I shouldn’t have, and two of them were dead,” he rasped. “How in the hell could I tell her mother that she was screwing another man, after Selena was already dead? That was her daughter. I couldn’t leave her with those kinds of memories of her daughter. It was better to let her think that I killed Selena and Alan without the details. It didn’t really matter.”
“You didn’t kill them,” Mara answered angrily, defensively. Sweet Jesus, Jared had taken the blame alone, too kind to tell his girlfriend’s mother or anyone else that he’d had a completely legitimate reason for leaving that night. The sheer selflessness that it had taken for Jared to shoulder all of the blame to let everyone else keep good memories of two people taken away so young nearly made her heart beat out of her chest with empathy for him. Jared had been young, but had still taken every criticism, every bit of blame to cover up for two dead young people who had betrayed his trust in every way.
“If I would have stayed—”
“You don’t know what would have happened. They would have been embarrassed. They knew you saw them?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes. Selena saw me.”
They wouldn’t have gone with you anyway, Jared. Please believe that. Jesus, he’d been so damn determined to take the blame and let everyone else grieve that he’d actually convinced himself that it was really true, that he’d really been completely responsible for their deaths. Just the thought of his girlfriend’s mother condemning Jared to hell when he was trying to actually save her and other people close to Selena and Alan from additional pain made furious tears flow from Mara’s eyes. Her heart felt like it was being torn from her chest as she imagined what it must have been like for him during that time. He’d been alone, without a single soul to talk to about his own grief and betrayal. That was why he’d gone on a bender, the emotional pain so severe that he’d needed to escape.
“Do you really think they would have calmly ridden home with you?” she finally asked him gently.
“I don’t know,” he answered huskily. “I don’t know.”
“You need to stop blaming yourself. They made several bad choices. None of them deserved to die. But you don’t know if things would have turned out any differently, and your reaction was perfectly normal. I would have done the same thing. I would have been upset, and I would have left.” Mara took a deep breath, tears still streaming down her face. She found it amazing that years after the incident, Jared still blamed himself. Not only had he needed to deal with the betrayal and the death of two of the most important people in his life, but he felt he had to take the blame for his girlfriend and friend getting killed on top of it.
“I wish I could believe that things wouldn’t have turned out any differently had I stayed and insisted on driving them.”
What person does that? What young guy that heartbroken was going to keep a cool head and calmly drive two people home who had betrayed him? “They wouldn’t have gone home with you. How long do you think they were involved?”
Jared released a masculine sigh. “Looking back, they may have been screwing each other for quite a while. They weren’t drunk enough that night for it to have been a first-time fling, and I heard them before I actually saw them fucking. Selena was rambling about how much she loved some of the things that Alan did to her. It wasn’t a new thing.” He paused and took a deep breath before continuing. “They started doing things together about halfway through my last year of college. I thought they were just friends, and I was trying to get the business together, so I was busy. Selena and I just kept growing more and more distant. I thought it was just because I was so busy.”
So it was Jared’s fault for that distance between them, too? He worked too much so his girlfriend found someone else to screw her?
The whole incident was beginning to make Mara pissed off and defensive for Jared’s sake. “Why didn’t she just break up with you?”
“Her family was happy we were together then. She came from a family who didn’t have much. After we met, I helped her pay for all her college fees. They were grateful. I think Selena was just waiting until she finished school to make the break,” Jared answered flatly. “She had one more year, and Alan didn’t have the funds to help her.”
Bitch! Mara didn’t know if Selena had ever cared about Jared or if he was just convenient to pay for her education. But she sounded like she was a user. And his so-called friend? What kind of guy did the horizontal mambo with his best friend’s girlfriend, a friend who was completely funding their start-up partnership in business together? Okay . . . neither of them deserved to die because they were users, but she wished they were still alive so she could bitch slap both of them. “So this misplaced guilt caused you to go over the edge?”
His body tensed. “How the hell do you know about that?”