Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 342

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Chapter 342

PAT

The hours had ticked by when I finally looked up from my desk, and I had spent the whole day buried in work I no longer remembered starting. My shoulders ached, my eyes burned, but the exhaustion in my body was nothing next to the exhaustion in my chest, because the truth was that I had not been able to get past what happened, not really, and pretending otherwise was getting harder with every passing hour.

I could not forgive myself. That was the plain and ugly center of it. I was the older friend, the sensible one, the voice of reason who was supposed to hold the line while everyone else lost their minds. And what had I done the moment Kingsley Duke turned those eyes on me? I had folded like a teenager who had never once been told that beautiful men lie.

How had I become this stupid?

I used to be proud of my instincts. Every man I had ever dated eventually packed his bags and told me, with varying degrees of politeness, that I was too smart for him. I noticed things. I caught the small cracks in a story the way other people caught a crooked picture frame, and I could not keep my mouth shut about them.

Seraphine had warned me once, in that syrupy voice she used when she was being unhelpful, that a woman who acted like she knew too much was a turnoff, that men wanted to feel clever, not corrected. I had tried. I really had. But my nature always leaked out, usually in the middle of a perfectly nice dinner, and the man across the table would get that faraway look that meant he was already planning his exit.

Then Celeste almost stopped coming to Helix, and Seraphine drifted in now and then but barely lifted a finger, and I poured every last drop of myself into keeping the lab breathing. That was where my late twenties went. That was where my early thirties started. There was no time for men, no time for anything but Helix, and I crossed thirty without ever noticing the milestone until it was already behind me.

Maybe that was it. Maybe the loneliness had finally caught up with me, and the first time a handsome man looked at me like I was the only woman in the room, I had thrown my brain out the window and followed my body straight off the ledge.

Even thinking about it made my face burn. I had given myself to him. Just like that. I had not verified a single one of the holes in the story he fed me, and there had been holes, real ones, wide enough to drive a truck through if I had only been paying attention. But I had not been paying attention. I had been too busy melting.

Celeste had told me he deleted the video, that it never reached Seraphine. I believed her, and I was grateful, but the relief did not wash away the shame. I had been an experiment. A transaction between him and Sera. The fact that he had a change of heart at the end did not make me feel one degree less cheap.

It had been eleven days since I gave myself to him, and the sting of his betrayal was as fresh as the morning it happened. I had gotten very good at pretending over the past week and a half. Celeste had been wonderful, more wonderful than I deserved, but only I knew how hard it was to stop hating myself long enough to smile.

When Celeste moved in with Dominic more than a week ago, I assumed I would barely see her. I assumed wrong. She came early every morning and stayed until close. Some days she had lunch with Dominic, and some days she had lunch with me, and those lunches had slowly become the closest I had been to her in years. She opened up to me now in a way she never used to, and somewhere along the line I had become the person she trusted with the messy parts. I tried to give her the same in return.

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