Not liking the strain etched into his features I shook my head. “Adam, we’re past all this. I didn’t mean for this to be painful. I just thought… well now that I have you I can take a step back and look at the pieces of our history without it hurting. And you know me.” I shrugged.
“The angst of it all seems romantic.” Then I frowned. “But you’re obviously not taking it that way so I’m going to put these away.”
He clamped a large hand down on mine as I moved to lift the diaries. I glanced up at him and he shook his head with a small smile. “It’s painful to read how my stupidity hurt you at the time, but I like being inside your head. I like knowing that while I was struggling with the fact that I had fallen in love with my best friend’s little sister, she loved me back more than I could ever hope to deserve.”
I grinned at him. “One: you deserve it. And two,” I gestured to the diaries, to the story of us, “It is totally romantic, right?”
Adam laughed, shaking his head at my single-minded determination to turn us into a romance novel. “Maybe. But don’t tell anyone I said so. It’ll ruin my reputation.”
I pushed through the diaries looking for the familiar purple leather of the last one. “Baby, you ruined that reputation when you told Braden Carmichael you were in love with me.”
“Cocky bastard knew all along,” Adam muttered unhappily. “Could have saved us a couple of months of worry.”
“You mean,” I found the diary and paged through it, “A couple of months of you being a mercurial pain in my arse.”
“Such a nice way to put it. But let’s not forget I wasn’t the only pain in the arse.”
“All I did was start dating again, and it took me ten months to do it after our little couch scene. You got off easy.” I thrust the diary at him and he took it with a scowl.
“I was staking my claim.”
“No, you were peeing all around your territory without actually staking a claim.”
He chuckled and bent his head over the latest page without responding… because he knew I was bloody right.
Sunday, August 13th
I haven’t had time to write anything down for a few days, partly because of studies and partly because my seething anger has been taking up quite a lot of my time. You see, it all started on Friday afternoon when a casual conversation with Nicholas ended in me wanting to strangle Adam…
As Joss and I walked toward The Meadows where we were meeting Braden, Adam, Jenna and Ed for a picnic, I considered telling her what I’d discovered about Adam yesterday while I was having coffee with my fellow student and friend, Nicholas. I didn’t get the chance to tell her yesterday because she’d been working at Club 39. I knew Joss would be pissed off for me and I needed that fire, I needed motivation to put Adam at an arm’s length and see how he liked it.
It had taken me and Adam a few months to get past the awkwardness of almost having sex, and even then things weren’t the same. If I thought about it, things hadn’t been the same for a while. I think maybe since the lip brush incident when I was nineteen.
Anyway, I knew obviously that Adam had slept with other girls since he’d had me on his couch and it hurt worse than I could ever explain. The whole incident made it difficult for me to move on and I hadn’t. I hadn’t been on a single date in ten months.
That was all about to change, however. After making a crack to Nicholas about my dry spell he’d told me maybe I’d have better luck getting a date if my friend Adam would stop going around intimidating men out of asking. Surprised and to say the least, confused, by this comment I’d asked him to elaborate only to discover that Nicholas had wanted to ask me out months ago. Knowing how close I was to Braden and Adam, but feeling Adam the safer choice, he’d called Adam and asked him for advice on where to take me out. Adam’s response had been, “Stay away from Ellie or I’ll break your face.”
What the hell was that?
Seriously?
I couldn’t even begin to process how not cool that was. He was warning perfectly nice guys away from me? So he was allowed to manwhore his way through Edinburgh but I wasn’t allowed to go on a single date? I didn’t think so.