Promise to Marry Read online

  “Please, Chloe. Baby?” He flashed me an innocent frown.

  “Fuck you, Jeff! Don’t you ‘baby’ me!”

  “Come on, let’s talk about this,” he persisted.

  “Get your head out of your ass, Jeff—or her ass for that matter! Don’t you get it? There’s nothing to talk about. We’re over!” I yanked my hand from his grasp and ran for his front door. I ran as fast as I could until I reached the safety of my car. It wasn’t until I drove away from his building that the anger evaporated away and tears took its place as they streamed down my face.

  I cried the entire way home. And as my mind raced with a million thoughts, there was one that seemed to resonate in my head more so than any other.

  It’s karma. After almost a year of eluding it, it’s finally caught up to me, and I deserve every painful moment of it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Present Day

  I was on a bender.

  I was on the reckless path leading to self destruction.

  I was completely and utterly lost.

  But the thing was, I didn’t care.

  This was what I wanted.

  This was the only way I knew how to mentally escape from everything.

  This was how fucked up I was.

  Tonight was yet another night I’d found myself at the neighborhood dive bar on Hollywood Boulevard. Much like the previous nights this week, I’d gotten home after work, absentmindedly ate whatever takeout I’d grabbed on the way home, took a few vodka shots in the kitchen—to save money, of course—before walking the four blocks to the bar to close out the night in a blurry haze.

  It was just a little before nine when I got to the bar tonight. It was a Friday, so the place was much more crowded than the previous nights. More options and no work in the morning, I thought to myself. I walked straight to the bar when I arrived and waved the bartender over.

  “Hey, there. Chloe, right?”

  “Yup, that’s me. Hey…?” I tilted my head toward him slightly, signaling for him to remind me of his name. Who could possibly keep track of names when you were just a few drinks away from being three sheets to the wind?

  “Steve.” He flashed me his perfect pearly whites as he wiped down the counter between us. Wannabe actor, I immediately thought. Living in Los Angeles, you could spot them from a mile away.

  “Right. Hi, Steve.”

  “So what are we having tonight?”

  “A glass of vodka, dirty, and a shot of Bacardi 151, hold the judgment.”

  He smirked at me. “So the usual?” I wasn’t sure why, but his smug comment bothered me.

  I didn’t answer him. But instead of waiting for a response, he went to make them, clearly taking my silence as a yes. A minute later, he was back with my drinks.

  “Tough day?” He placed the glasses in front of me and looked at me with half-interest.

  “How about tough week?” I corrected him as I threw back the shot of 151 and chased it down with a healthy gulp of vodka.

  “Whoa there.” Steve raised his eyebrows, his eyes widening slightly with surprise. “Honey, you’d better slow your roll if you want to remember anything in the morning.”

  “Didn’t I say ‘hold the judgment?’” I challenged him, feeling agitated by how he looked at me with unease, like I was some unstable person who needed help. It’s not like he hasn’t seen me drink the previous nights.

  Okay fine, so maybe I was a little unstable, and maybe I did need help. But he was the bartender. I was paying him to make me my drinks, not to be my shrink.

  To my relief, Steve had no time to respond. A group of girls at the far end of the bar waved him down, and he seemed relieved to leave our conversation to go take their drink orders.

  As I sat there and sipped my vodka, something from the corner of my eye caught my attention. A girl with electric-blue hair had just walked through the front door and was waving to a group of people sitting at a booth on the opposite end of the bar. It wasn’t this particular girl, nor the color of her hair that I was drawn to. It was the red heart-shaped lock secured around the strap of her messenger bag that had caused my body to tense up.

  “Ugh. I don’t want to think about him,” I muttered under my breath as I peeled my eyes off the red lock. But the harder I tried to not think about him, the more thoughts of him that began to surface in the forefront of my mind. Jax. I downed the rest of my vodka, trying to drown out my thoughts. “I want to think about anything but him right now.”

  “Why don’t you think about me instead?” came a voice from right behind me.

  The closeness of his voice alarmed me momentarily, but I recovered quickly and turned to face the stranger who had just walked up to the bar and sat down on the stool next to mine. He flashed me a meaningful smile and I gave him a quick once-over before returning my gaze to my empty glass. He looked to be in his mid-twenties and was cute enough for my purposes.

  “And why exactly should I think about you?” I challenged in my flirtatious voice.

  “Well, a sexy lady like you shouldn’t be drinking alone and not thinking about me.”

  I raised an eyebrow but didn’t turn back to look at him right away. I liked that he was cocky and had more confidence about himself than he should probably possess. He was exactly what I was looking for tonight.

  When I finally turned to meet his salivating gaze, I knew by the way he looked at me that this was going to be too easy.

  “Well, you’re wrong. I’m not drinking alone tonight.” For a second, his face fell. “—because I’m drinking with you.”

  His face immediately lit up like a Christmas tree in December and he inched his seat closer to mine. There was a greedy lust in his eyes, and I knew to him, this was probably his lucky night, where a sleazy pick-up line actually worked for a change. But to me, I just needed to forget.

  “So what would you like to drink?”

  “Another glass of vodka, dirty.”

  “Dirty,” he repeated. “I like that.” He smirked and licked his lips.

  “I’m sure you do,” I shot back sarcastically.

  “You’re feisty.” He laughed and motioned Steve over. I avoided Steve’s gaze, not wanting to see any hint of judgment in his eyes. I was on a good buzz, and I didn’t need it to be ruined by reality.

  “So my name’s Brent. What’s yours?”

  “C—” I paused for a second. “Carly.” I grinned over at him. All I wanted to do tonight was to forget about who I was. It seemed fitting in more ways than one to use her name.

  When the drinks came, I grabbed mine and downed half the glass without bothering to wait for the guy.

  He chuckled as he reached for his drink. “I love a woman who can appreciate a good, stiff drink.”

  Feeling tired of this forced banter, I moved my hand under the bar counter. When I found the growing bulge in his jeans, I leaned over and whispered so only he could hear, “That’s not the only stiff thing I can appreciate.”

  That not-so-subtle invitation was all it took. Minutes later, before he had a chance to even taste his drink, we were in the men’s bathroom where he had me pinned up against the wall in the last stall.

  “Fuck me hard,” I demanded as his hands frantically removed my black mini-dress over my head and threw it over the stall door. “I want it rough and painful.”

  “You’re a bad girl, aren’t you, Carly?” he growled in my ear, the heat of his breath sending a mixture of anticipation and disgust to run down my body. But I knew I couldn’t stop. I knew I wanted to stop thinking. I knew I needed this escape, now more than ever. I closed my eyes and felt the alcohol numbing my body as his hungry mouth pressed hard against mine and his hands began to massage my breasts. I gasped and moaned at all the appropriate moments, but my heart wasn’t in it. It was as if I was having an out-of-body experience and I was watching an up-close porno. My body didn’t resist as his moved down to my breasts, his tongue flicking my nipples as his hand disappeared down between my legs, his fingers explorin
g the depths of my wetness. I heard myself cry out in pleasure as his slightly-curled fingers moved in and out of me, causing my legs to buckle under me.

  Then he pulled out of me and sucked my juices from his fingers as he dropped his pants and slipped on a condom. I could see from the hungry frenzy in his eyes that there was no turning back.

  “You want it rough, baby?” His ragged voice was dark and threatening.

  “Yes,” I heard myself beg.

  Suddenly he lifted my legs off the ground, and I felt his erection rub against my entrance. “God, you’re so fucking wet,” he groaned in a hoarse voice.

  I was about to respond, but it was too late. Instead, I cried out in both pain and pleasure as I felt him plunge all the way inside me, not holding back a single inch of him. I dug my nails deep into the muscular hardness of his back as each of his violent thrusts went deeper and harder than the last. Through my half-opened eyes, I saw his face twisted in pleasure as uncontrollable gasps and moans escaped my lips.

  A few minutes later, we finally climaxed, taking me to the peak of pleasure and oblivion. In that split second, my mind was completely free from the shackles of my thoughts. But as quickly as it came, it also left, and as I pulled up my panties and adjusted the dress on my body, reality began to creep its way back into my consciousness.

  “Fuck, that was incredible,” he growled in a husky voice as he leaned forward to nuzzle against my neck.

  I cringed and averted his touch and reached for the bathroom-stall door.

  “Where are you going with that sexy ass of yours?”

  I felt a little dizzy and sick but turned back to face him. When our eyes met, I realized that I had just let a complete stranger fuck me in a disgusting bathroom stall, and it wasn’t until after our dirty act that I’d actually looked at him clearly for the first time.

  Why did I do this, again?

  To escape the pain you fell in your heart, I heard a small voice respond inside me.

  But escaping the pain was short-lived. Not even the empty bliss of an orgasm could keep it at bay for too long. I felt my body waking up from the pain-numbing effects of ecstasy and I knew I needed to get out of here before things got worse.

  As I started to pull the stall door open to leave, his hand found mine and pulled me back inside. Before I could pull away, he guided my hand down to his already-hard erection.

  “How about another round?”

  I looked away, cringing inside at what I had just done with this stranger. “Sorry. I gotta go, Bryan,” I said as I finally managed to pull my hand out of his grip. I quickly opened the door and stumbled out of the stall.

  “It’s Brent.”

  “What?” I looked back at him, realizing he had just said something to me. My mind was somewhere else—already running away from this mistake.

  “My name is Brent, not Bryan.”

  I sighed. “Look. I really don’t care. I’m not looking for anything serious here. If I was, I probably wouldn’t have let you fuck me in the men’s bathroom at a bar after meeting you for less than five minutes.” Shame consumed me when I realized that I had just slept with another man I had no feelings for.

  “Oh, don’t be like that,” he teased. “We can still go back out to the bar, have a few more drinks, and then take the party back to my place for a night cap.”

  “Trust me,” I said almost inaudibly as I turned away from him, “you don’t want anything to do with me.”

  Regret gripped my insides as I ran out of the bathroom without waiting for him to respond.

  Turning thirty had rattled me more than I wanted to admit. I wanted to blame it on the events of last week—blame Jeff for cheating on me, blame Carly for being a shitty friend, blame my luck for having it all happen to me on my thirtieth birthday. But I knew deep down there was something more to my unhappiness. I knew it had nothing to do with Jeff, or even Carly. I knew it was something that had been brewing over the past nine years. What happened with Jeff and Carly was only the trigger, the tip of the iceberg. But they weren’t the iceberg. They weren’t the root of the immense pain I’d bottled up inside, a pain that’d pressed against my chest, unable to find its release.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Present Day

  By the time I stumbled into my apartment, I felt like shit. I felt dirty. I felt more alone than I’d ever remembered feeling. All the drinks I’d had in the last few hours crashed down on me all at once and I felt myself start to unravel emotionally. I knew I shouldn’t fixate on the one thing—the one person—who could push me further down this rabbit hole, but it was too late.

  In my drunken stupor, I pulled up Facebook and typed his name in the search box: “Jackson Pierce.” He was the first result. We had twenty-one mutual friends. But we weren’t friends. He’d de-friended me after that day. I hovered the cursor over his name and hesitated. I knew there would be no turning back once I clicked through. I knew I’d want to look through everything. Twice. I knew this wasn’t healthy for me. But it was just too hard to resist. I was like a kid who was left in a room alone and told not to look inside the shiny box full of toys. I have to look! This is killing me, I convinced myself.

  Before I could snap to my senses, I clicked on his name. In a blink of an eye, I was staring straight at his profile picture. His olive complexion, his rich, emerald eyes, his warm smile—he looked more handsome than I’d remembered, and he looked happy as his photo smiled back at me. I smiled back and traced the outline of his face with my fingers. For the next hour, I felt myself tumbling down the bottomless rabbit hole as I combed through his Facebook page, looking through every status, every comment, every photo. I tried to soak up everything I could about his life, trying to imagine myself in it, trying to imagine how my life would be if we were still friends—if I hadn’t destroyed our friendship.

  “I’m sorry, Jax,” I whispered to his photo. “If I could go back and do things differently, I wouldn’t have hurt you. I would have figured out another way through the mess.”

  Against my better judgment, I stumbled over to my bookshelf and riffled through a box of CDs on the bottom shelf. As soon as I found what I was searching for, I pulled it out and pushed it into the CD slot of my sound system. It was a CD Jax had made for me a decade ago when we were in college. I never knew why I hadn’t realized then how he’d felt about me, but every song on the CD made it perfectly clear that he wanted to be more than friends, that he wanted the same thing I’d wanted for us but was too scared to hope for. I fast-forwarded to my favorite track on the playlist, Jeff Buckley’s “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over,” and programmed it to play on a repeated loop.

  I slumped down on the couch, suddenly feeling physically and emotionally drained. As the guitar strummed the melancholy melody and Jeff Buckley’s deep voice sang the hypnotic song about young lovers and regret, tears began to stream down my face. I’d tried for a long time to hide from the truth, to ignore my true feelings for him, but tonight, after I’d lost everything that seemed to have had any value to me, there were no more walls I could hide behind.

  I missed him. I’d missed him for a very long time now. Deeply. Desperately. Painfully. I missed him to the point where it’d become hard to breathe. I would give anything for us to be best friends again. I would give anything for him to be here by my side right now like he’d promised me years ago when I felt lonely. Tears continued to stream down my face as the song radiated through me and the lyrics hit home, speaking straight to my heart and how I was feeling about him.

  Just then I sat straight up on the couch. “Maybe it’s not too late,” I said out loud as I responded to a line in the lyrics. “Maybe we’re like this song and we were just too young for anything good to happen between us? But now we’re older…”

  Before I knew what I was doing, I pulled up the number I’d had of his from years ago and pressed the call button before I could change my mind.

  After two rings, he picked up and I heard his half-awake voice mumble, “Hello?”
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  I drew in a deep breath, ready to tell him everything, that I was sorry, that I’d missed him, that I was thirty and single, and the only person I wanted to be with was him. But nothing came out of my mouth. I felt paralyzed by fear.

  “Hello?” I heard him say again, this time sounding louder and more awake.

  Suddenly, in a moment of clarity, I panicked and ended the call without saying a word. What was I thinking calling him in the middle of the night when I was wasted, reckless, and emotionally unstable? We hadn’t talked or seen each other since that day nine years ago. Nothing good could come out of a late-night drunken phone call right now.

  I let out a groan and slumped back onto the couch. It was then that the pile of bills and junk mail I had thrown on the coffee table several days earlier caught my attention. There, in the middle of the stack, was a thick, large, ivory card-stock envelope. I reached over and plucked it from the pile. I didn’t have to open it to know that it was a wedding invitation. I glanced at the return address.

  Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery

  6843 Lester Court

  West Chester, Pennsylvania

  West Chester. That was where I grew up with Aunt Betty and Uncle Tom. But who were the Montgomerys?

  Then it hit me. Clara Montgomery. The always-bubbly and high-spirited girl from high school. She had been in the same circle of friends with me and Jax. I hadn’t talked to her in over two years, and that was when I had randomly run into her on a quick trip home to visit Aunt Betty and Uncle Tom after I had been abroad for five years and before I’d moved to Los Angeles.

  I smiled. She had always been nice to me, the eternal optimist in our group. I was glad to see she’d found happiness. As I read the wedding invitation, I wondered if Jax was going to go to Clara’s wedding this summer. A jolt of anxious nerves shot through me as I imagined seeing him again, after all this time, after everything that had happened. Hundreds of questions invaded my mind. What would I say to him? What would he say to me? Was he single? Did he miss me? Could he forgive me? Was there a way things could go back to the way they were? With all the questions I had, my mind seemed to always return to the same one: Did he remember our pact?