Eenie Meenie Minie Mo

Chapter Forty

   For a minute, I just stared at Sawyer in pure horror, his words not fully registering in my slow mind. I would have thought he was lying just to appear as if he hadn’t been completely thrown. But the way he said it, I know, it was like he’d been expecting me to cave and tell him this entire time—or worse; he’d been expecting me to give into Leander.

  “You know….?” I sputtered at last. A quick lash of anger coursed through me, my hands shaking. “Who told you?”

  “No one told me, Kodi. I was here. I saw it,” Sawyer answered somewhat bitterly.

  I slapped my hand over my mouth to cover my gasp. Oh my God, no. No, nononono! He couldn’t have seen. This was so much worse than I ever would have imagined. He saw? How… “No. You were gone, you….You told me you were gone.”

  “I stayed behind,” he said simply, and yet there was still an undertone of anger in his voice. But why wouldn’t there be? “I wanted to see if maybe you’d change your mind about coming up with us, so I stayed behind.  I waited for you to get home. By the time I noticed you were back, though, you were talking with Verona…..and then you weren’t talking at all.”

  I shut my eyes and looked away, too ashamed to even look at him. He really had seen. “You knew this whole time,” I whispered, “and you didn’t say anything?”

  Sawyer let out a dark chuckle. “What was I gonna say?”

  “I don’t know!” I looked at him finally, hot tears immediately slipping into the corners of my eyes. “Anything! God, if I’d known you saw everything….I would have told you sooner!”

  “You probably should have told me anyway, don’t you think?”

  “I wanted to,” I said pitifully. “Well, no. That’s a lie. I didn’t want to. But I was going to anyway. I just….I didn’t know what to say. Sawyer, I swear, I didn’t plan for any of this to happen. I never wanted to hurt you, I’m so sorry.”

  “I know that,” he relented. “I just…” He chuckled again in a way that was not Sawyer at all. “You’ve never kissed me like that.”

  And, finally, I couldn’t hold in my tears anymore. They poured down my face in rivulets. I had no right to pull out the waterworks. For the most part I’d been trying my best to hold them back. But he’d just shocked the hell out of me. Imagining him witnessing what happened….I couldn’t even.

  “I’m so sorry,” was all I could manage. It was weak and it meant nothing in lue of what Sawyer must have been feeling. But it was all I could give. What else could I do? “I wanted this to work so badly. I really did. I don’t even know why I let that happen….”

  “I do.”

  I looked back up at Sawyer, startled for the billionth time in the past five minutes.

  Sighing, he shrugged his shoulders, smiling sadly. “You’re not over him. I don’t really think you ever have been.”