“No, I think Gracie and I are going to head out,” he said giving me a hard look. “Besides, you seem to be in good hands,” he stated matter a factly before turning around and walking out the door.

Gracie looked at me and cocked her eyebrow, but only said a quick “goodbye” before following Garrett out of the bar.

I pushed my chair into the table hard enough for it to fall on the floor.

“What is going on between you two?” Damien asked.

“Me and Gracie?” I asked, purposefully obtuse. Damien frowned.

“No, you and that Garrett guy,” he clarified and I could only shake my head.

“We were a huge mistake,” I said sadly, feeling the truth of the words deep in my bones.

Damien’s jaw set as he picked up on what exactly I was telling him. “So you guys really did sleep together.” He pushed his hair off his forehead and grimaced. “I was really hoping that stuff you were yelling at each other last week was more about being angry than based on something that actually happened.”

I sighed and scrubbed my face with my hands before dropping them back to my side. “What do you want me to say, Damien? You broke up with me. I was upset. I thought you and me were forever and then suddenly we weren’t. I was in a really messed up place,” I shot out and Damien flinched.

“And Garrett was there. He and I hooked up and I thought for a stupid second it might mean something. But that was before I remembered who he was and who I’m supposed to be.”

I hated how incredibly egotistical those words sounded but it felt like honesty. Garrett and I weren’t meant to be. It didn’t matter that we had existed in a moment in time where we made perfect sense.

Each time we had been together had been abnormal circumstances. First when I was so drunk, sleeping with him hadn’t felt like a lapse in judgment. And the second time when I was so out of my mind with misery that it seemed he was the only one to hold me together.

If I had learned anything it was that I didn’t trust my heart to lead me down the right path. My emotions were too conflicted and messy where Garrett Bellows was concerned and I knew that following them would be a disaster.

I wasn’t a person to allow my head to overrule my heart. Even now, in the early stages of my grieving, I clung to my reason like a lifeline. Garrett and I were too different. Even though he had shown me a side of himself that revealed a man who at one time had wanted more for his life, it didn’t change the fact of where he was now.

And whom he was currently with.

And that who was my good friend.

“And who are you, Riley?” Damien asked with a hopeful expression on his face. He took my hand in his, cautiously at first but when I didn’t pull immediately away, he squeezed and moved closer.

I looked into the brown eyes that at one time had signified everything I wanted in my life. Damien was my ideal match in everyway. We had the same goals, the same ambitions. Damien and I were driven in similar ways, propelled by a passionate need to succeed and thrive.

And if those likenesses felt a little empty now, I was determined to overlook that and forget about the boy with the long blond hair who made me question everything I thought I had wanted in my life.

Because how could a guy like Garrett give me my happily ever after when we spent most our time cataloging the million and one ways we didn’t work? We couldn’t. End of story.

“I’m Riley Walker and I have an amazing future ahead of me. I know exactly what I want out of life and I will make my dad proud of me,” I said with desperation. I needed those words to be true. Otherwise I didn’t know what I would do.

Damien, emboldened by my seeming acceptance of his touch, put his arm around me. “And you will, Riley. If anyone can be something great, it’s you,” he said emphatically. His words, whether they were genuine or not, were exactly what I needed to hear.

Without thinking about what I was doing, I leaned in and kissed his mouth. Damien froze, as though worried that should he react in any way, I would bolt.

“Kiss me,” I whispered against his mouth, forcing down the sudden self-loathing that tasted like bile in the back of my throat.

What was I doing? I thought furiously to myself as Damien wrapped his arms around me, his fingers curling into the back of my hair the way he had done a thousand times before.

But his lips felt foreign against mine. As if they didn’t belong there anymore. It felt like kissing a stranger. Or someone I used to know but had long since outgrown.

I put those thoughts out of my mind and threw myself into kissing the boy who had so recently broken my heart. The boy I thought I would never get over until another boy came along and proved that perhaps I had never really given away my heart at all. Until him.

STOP! I screamed silently and pressed my lips so hard against Damien’s that I cut the sensitive tissue against my teeth.

Damien pulled back and looked at me questioningly. He had to know there was more to this kiss than me wanting him. That desire and love had absolutely nothing to do with it. That this was a kiss born out of guilt and confusion and a staunch denial of a part of me that needed to die a quick and silent death.

Damien rubbed his thumb along my bottom lip, which had started to bleed. “What was that about?” he asked quietly, his eyes troubled.

I jerked my head away and moved out of his grip, giving myself and my continued poor decision making some distance. “Why does it have to be about anything?” I asked with hostility, already feeling foolish.

Damien’s lips quirked into a sad smile. “Because with you, Ri, it’s always about something. I just hoped it would be about me,” he said and I knew I wasn’t being fair to him right now. Mostly because even as I tried not to, I couldn’t stop thinking of Garrett walking out of the bar with Gracie behind him.

I couldn’t stop imagining what they were doing. What they meant to each other. What I had meant to Garrett. I hated how much I cared. I didn’t want to care. I was sick of feeling! Emotions got me nowhere but up to my chin in hurt and pain.

I gripped the front of Damien’s shirt and pulled him angrily toward me. “Let’s not think about it okay,” I demanded him, wondering briefly if I was setting myself up for more rejection. But I knew by the way his eyes heated as he looked at me that there would be no refusal.

Damien Green wanted me in whatever way he could have me. And I was taking advantage of that. Willing to use his body to forget. To forget my life that had somehow careened off track.

“Okay,” Damien said huskily, his glasses sliding down his nose as he leaned in to kiss me again.

“Can I come home with you tonight?” I asked, trying not to feel like a piece of shit for what I was propositioning.

Damien licked his lips. “There’s nothing I want more,” he murmured, pulling his keys out of his pocket and taking my hand in his.

You’d think I would have learned something about ill-advised hookups from jumping into Garrett’s bed. They only lead to complete upheaval.

But I wanted to go back to a time when my world was what I wanted it to be. A time where my dad was still alive, my heart still in one piece and the boy who shared my life was safe and predictable.

“Let’s go,” I said, trying not hate myself as I followed Damien to his car.

“Hey, Riley. Hey Damien,” Maysie said with a tone that reeked of disapproval. Normally that was my mode of communication and it didn’t feel good hearing it come from Maysie Ardin of all people.

It was three weeks before the end of the semester. I had fallen into some form of a quasi relationship with Damien that wasn’t quite dating but not just friendship. I absolutely refused to give him the title of boyfriend, however.

After leaving the bar with Damien that night all those weeks ago, I had gone home with him.

And no, perv, I didn’t sleep with him.

Yes, I had planned to originally but once I had gotten there I couldn’t do it.

Yay for self-respect!

Instead we had stayed up talking like we used to. And I was able to remember that aside from being my boyfriend, Damien had at one time been one of my closest friends.

After that, it became easier and easier to spend time with him. A drink after work. Studying at the library in the evenings. A lecture on environmental responsibility in the student hall. Small things that morphed into something else entirely.

Being around Damien again was like putting on a pair of well-worn shoes that had started to pinch my toes. He was still the liberal minded, environmentally aware, poetry writing, save the whales kind of guy. He still looked down his nose at people who didn’t recycle and easily judged anyone that didn’t share his single-minded vision of the world. At one time our vision had been one and the same. We were unified in our sneering, derisive judgments.

But I had come to realize it wasn’t so easy to sit on your soapbox when you scratched below the surface of what you were railing against. Because what you might find there could blow your mind

But now, even as I allowed myself to be pulled back into the way things were, it didn’t feel quite right. Even as I fought tooth and nail to make it all fit. Because I wanted something that was just as I remembered it. Before my life had changed too much for me to get a handle on. I craved the lack of emotional chaos and Damien provided that on some level.

Because lord knew, the rest of my universe was in a tailspin. First on the fast train to emo territory was the sad destruction of my family.

I had gone home for Thanksgiving break and it had been miserable. I had visions of creating new traditions; that somehow Mom, Gavin, Fliss and I would carve out a new niche after Dad’s death. What a deluded moron I had been.

While Mom had tried to put on a brave face, it had lasted only as long as it took me to unpack. Mom broke down and cried through most of my visit. There was no large family dinner this year. Instead, my mother, brother and myself ate a crappy meal at Denny’s before coming home and going to our separate bedrooms. My sister and her family didn’t even bother to come, claiming the girls were sick. I knew that they just hoped to avoid exactly what I had experienced, a get together meant to induce heavy drinking.

My brother was a mess. He had moved back in with Mom and it disgusted me how she was having to take care of him even though he was almost forty years old. And I was furious that she was enabling it.

When I asked her about it, she told me, politely and gently of course, to mind my own business and that everyone dealt with grief in their own way. This was Gavin’s way and I should respect that.

It had been hard, but I let it go. Hoping my mother knew the best way to handle the situation.

So after that depressing excuse for a holiday, I had latched onto school and classes as though it was all I had. And maybe in some ways it was. It was the only thing I had a hundred percent complete control over anyway.

And thankfully my desperation paid off. My midterm grades had buoyed my spirits. Straight A’s. I was hoping to be on the Dean’s List again this semester. And I could almost hear my dad telling me how proud he was of me. I felt obsessed with the need to prove myself.

It was no longer just about me but about showing that my dad’s faith in me was founded. Part of me realized that I wasn’t handling my grief in a healthy way. That I was shoving it aside in favor of a dogged determination to succeed.

My social life was non-existent. Maysie was so immersed in all things Jordan and Generation Rejects that I rarely saw her. Gracie and I had developed a relationship built on wary mistrust. Our one time friendship deteriorating under the strain of her silent bitterness. Because she would never acknowledge how she felt about me. To everyone else, we appeared friendly. Two girls who got along.

But I felt the rift and it sucked. I didn’t know what to do about it. And the more time that passed, the larger the division between us became.

And with Gracie came Vivian, so there went fifty percent of my social interactions. So maybe it was more out of loneliness that I allowed Damien back into my world.

Whatever it was, he was there, like he had never left. I wish I could say it felt like finding something that I had been missing, but then I would be lying. It was more like stepping into a bath that was luke warm. Not really relaxing or comfortable, but it didn’t make you jump out and take a shower instead.

Crap, my metaphors were as bad as my reasoning.

“You coming to the Rejects’ gig tonight? It should be fun. This will be their last one before heading out on tour after Christmas,” Maysie asked me, deliberately ignoring Damien.

Damien squeezed in closer to me, at the mention of the band. Yep, he was still feeling very insecure about Garrett and it manifested rather noticeably whenever anything Generation Rejects related was mentioned.

I tried not to feel suffocated by the way he pressed against me. “Uh, I don’t think so. I’m off tonight and Damien and I were heading out to a poetry reading later,” I answered, trying to inch away from an overly clingy Damien.

Maysie caught my movement and eyed me knowingly. “Poetry reading? Come on, you can do boring shit any night. Jordan asked if you’d come,” Maysie needled.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” I said, getting to my feet. I headed into the kitchen, knowing Maysie was hot on my heels.

“Come on, Ri. I’m not sure what you’re playing at right now, but the Riley Walker I know wouldn’t even breathe the same air as Damien after everything he put you through. If this is about Garrett”

I held my hand up, interrupting that line of thought before it could go any further.

“Don’t go there. Just don’t,” I warned, grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge.

Maysie sighed. “Riley, don’t make the same mistakes that I did. I almost lost the most important thing in my life because I had unrealistic expectations about my life and what a relationship should look like,” Maysie warned, pulling a bag of popcorn from the cabinet and putting it in the microwave. I didn’t say anything. Mostly because I was too busy processing the fact that at some point in all of this mess I called a life, our roles had reversed. Maysie had, unbeknownst to me, become the no nonsense voice of reason and I had become the screwed up head case with a bad case of I-can’t-make-up-my-mind.