Page 116 of The Wrong Game

I dropped my hands.

I took a step away from her.

And then, she finally looked at me.

“This is a joke,” I said, searching her emerald eyes. They were so dark that night, so tired, still glossed over with tears she wouldn’t let fall. “You’re not fucking serious. After everything… why the hell would you take someone else to the game. What does that mean?” I took a step toward her, filling the space I’d just left between us. “What about us?”

She squeezed her eyes shut at that, tears finally spilling down over the apples of her cheeks.

“Gemma,” I said, reaching for her. “Whatever is going on, whatever made you feel this way, we can figure it out. Together.”

“No,” she whispered, and when my hands touched her, she jerked away. “No!”

I held my hands up, and she watched me with wild eyes, like an abused dog backed into a corner.

“Don’t you get it?” she said. “What we’ve been doing, pretending everything is fine. It’s not fine.I’mnot fine, Zach. Everything feels amazing right now. We’re spending all our time together. You’re letting me in, I’m letting you in. I’m trusting you, you’re trusting me. But you know what?” Gemma stepped into my space then. “It will all change. All of it. This, what we feel,” she said, gesturing between us. “It’s temporary. And it’ll go away. And no matter what you say now, what you believe now, one day it’ll change and you’ll lie to me and break my heart and I’ll be on the floor again and I can’t—”

Her voice broke, and she covered her mouth with one hand, shaking her head. And I saw it in her eyes, the ghost of her husband, haunting her still.

She lost her husband, the one she’d thought she’d spend forever with.

Of course, she was hurting. Of course, she wasn’t okay.

But I could help her. I could love her through it — through anything.

“Gemma, I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

“You can’t promise that!” she screamed. “Remember? We said. We made that a rule.No promises.”

“Gemma—”

“I’ve heard those words before,” she said, cutting me off. “I’ve seen those same eyes, believed a man when he said I was the only one for him.”

Her words ripped from her throat like the roaring flames of a dragon, but they only confused me.

“He said the same things. He believed them, too, which is whyIdid. I mean, you could have hired an escort to try to sway him, Zach, and he would have shoved her aside and looked for me. You could have promised him the hottest woman on the planet, and he’d still have said he wantedme.” She rolled her lips together, two more tears slipping from her eyes as she let out something close to a laugh. “But it changed. It alway does. And I’m not doing it again. Ican’tdo it again.”

“Gemma, I don’t understand.” I reached for her, but she backed away again.

“He cheated on me!” she screamed.

The words echoed off the brick walls around us, circling us again and again until they finally faded, but I’d hear them forever.

Gemma’s eyes watered again, and she couldn’t fight the tears off now, they came so fast. She shook her head, running her hands back through her hair as she turned away from me.

“He was having an affair. And the same day I was going to tell him that I knew, the same day I put down a deposit on the place I live in now, the day I was going to tell him I was done and we were getting a divorce?” She turned then, pinning me with her stare. “Was the same day he told me he was dying of cancer.”

I opened my mouth, but I didn’t know why. I didn’t have a single word to say.

Gemma nodded, her eyes reading mine. “Yeah. So I stayed, and I held my tongue, and held my husband’s hand as I watched him wither away in just four short weeks. And when he died,shewas there — in the back pew, crying more than me, mourning the man she loved who was married to a woman she never considered was being hurt in the process.” She paused. “Brielle. I know her name now. And somehow, that makes her even more real.”

Her face twisted at that, and she leaned against the brick wall again, shoulders slumped.

Her eyes were distant when she spoke again. “Yes, she was there, at his funeral,” Gemma repeated. “But it was me who buried him. And I buried his secret right along with him. I never told him I knew. I never told anyone, other than Belle.”

“Jesus, Gemma,” I breathed. My hands ached so bad to hold her, to pull her into me, but I kept them fisted at my sides. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Exactly,” she spat back. “You didn’t know, because I didn’t tell you. Because I don’t trust you. I thought I did, but I was lying to myself, and to you. I don’t trustanyone,” she emphasized, shaking her head. “Not anymore.”