Chapter 8

Jade

Hurt bloomed in my chest before I sucked it up and turned to open the box.

As I took care of the wound, he paced for a while, surveying the absolute disarray of the kitchen then eventually stopping to face me.

“Is this what you’ve been up to all week?” he demanded with a hand on his hip. “Making these kinds of stupid mistakes that even a child would be embarrassed to make?”

“It wasn’t on purpose—” I tried to explain myself again but he cut me off a second time.

“Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t. But you can’t just help yourself, can you? Or was this a ploy of yours to get me running back here so you wouldn’t be alone anymore? Is that why you called my mom to report me?”

“Stop throwing all these accusations at me!” I finally snapped, whirling around on him. “Your mom called me to check in on us. She’s been calling everyday since the engagement asking about you but I kept coming up with excuses until they just weren’t believable any longer and she finally caught on that you haven’t been living here with me. I never reported you to her.”

My chest heaved up and down as I ended my rant, expecting him to sober up from the realization that he was in the wrong. But his expression only hardened further.

“Well, you should have come up with more believable excuses. Now here I am being faced with trying to take care of a mess you caused.”

I stared at him in disbelief.

I couldn’t help but notice how the scruff on his jaw was a little bit more dense, making him look almost primal. Even in his anger, how on earth did I still find him attractive?

I must be broken.

“That’s all you have to say?” I finally asked him in a small voice.

He stepped closer to me, his size completely dwarfing mine, and the shiver that ran down my spine from his intimidating proximity wasn’t pleasant in the slightest. But his unique musky scent still sent a tiny tingle through me, telling me I wasn’t completely unaffected by him like I was trying so hard to portray.

“I’m not going to be your babysitter, Jade,” he said without feeling. “Figure out how to put your shit in order. Just because we’re engaged doesn’t mean I’ll be jumping in to save you from your own careless decisions all the time.”

I tried blinking back my tears but couldn’t hold them in any longer and they spilled down onto my cheeks in two streams of despair. “What did I do to deserve this kind of harsh treatment from you?” I asked in a broken whisper.

“This. You acting like a damn baby and expecting me to treat you like an equal. I need someone powerful to stand by my side as a partner, but you’re the exact opposite of that. How do you expect me to take you seriously? Or pretend this can work?”

“You hate me.” I said, sniffling softly at the painful realization. “So why did you still go ahead with the engagement? What’s the whole point of this then? Us being together?”

“I have my reasons,” he responded in a sharp tone that told me he wasn’t going to expand any further on the matter. “If you stay out of my way, you’ll be fine. Also work on coming up with better excuses because you’d need a lot of them in the future.”

“So we’re engaged but just in title only.”

“Precisely. Now we’re getting somewhere. You aren’t just a dumb little brat after all.”

I glared at him with sad, wet eyes. How was he so… so cruel? Dispassionate. Unconcerned about my feelings.

Something had to have happened to him to make him go through this sudden drastic transformation overnight. He was like a different person occupying the same body. It was heartbreaking to watch the man I had loved all my life spill such cutting words at me.

“What if we need to show up together for public events?” I asked as his phone buzzed in his pocket.

He took it out and looked down at the screen, his focus immediately shifting away from our conversation. “Just like our engagement party, we’d have to pretend like we’re a happy couple,” he answered distractedly.

I watched as he typed out something on his phone, a war happening within me.

I should tell him that I wanted no part in his humiliating game of deception. He was only using me and I ought to break off the engagement right this very moment.

But I just… couldn’t.

Now that I had him, I couldn’t give up that easily.

A few days of hate couldn’t erase seventeen years of love. And to me, him not outrightly breaking off the engagement gave me a bit of foolish hope, that there was still a chance I could turn his heart towards me, make him find me worthy of being his partner if I just figured out what he wanted and tried hard enough to become that woman for him.

So I wiped my face and looked up at him with an expression of fragile optimism. “In that case, my best friend is throwing me a party for my twenty-first birthday celebration this weekend. We’ll be expected to attend together.”

“No. I’ll be busy.” He didn’t even look up from his phone as he broke my heart a little more.