Love/Fail

Chapter 25

Annoying Pinspiration Quote #25

"It's better to know and be disappointed than never know and always wonder."

"I know who you are," I said, blocking her access into the house. Forget the fact that Jade towered over me by at least six inches, and was sporting a look that could have come straight from the catwalk. With her black halter-neck maxi dress swirling around her tapered ankles, and long tanned limbs that seemed to go on forever, Jade was almost too beautiful to look at directly.

I might have been in the jeans and tank I'd slept in, and my hair definitely didn't tumble around me in sculpted waves – it was doing more of a birds nest style. But our polar opposite looks didn't intimidate me. I faced her head on and said, "You are not welcome here."

Jade's butterfly shaped lips were pressed together in confusion. "I'm sorry, are you the maid? I'd like to speak to Rupert personally, thank you."

"I'm not the maid!" I squawked. "I'm Mia. And no, you may not speak with Rupert personally. Actually, you can sod right off, love." I even said it in Rupert's accent, just so she'd realise I was closer with him than she'd assumed.

"Oh. Oh! Are you... are you with Rupert?" Her gorgeous face twisted in confusion.

"Seriously? Do you want to be any more insulting?"

"I didn't mean to be."

"Well, you are." Telling off a gorgeous movie star was actually pretty fun. Leaning on the doorframe, I pontificated. "You're implying that I'm not good enough looks-wise to be with someone like Rupert."

"You're not exactly his type," she said softly.

"Yeah, well, the last woman who was his type left him without a single word of explanation the week she married him." I shrugged, feeling vastly superior. "Guess he decided he needs a new type, because the beautiful-and-heartless thing didn't really work out for him."

Giant glossy tears arose in Jade's magnificent emerald eyes. "I'm not heartless."

"Then just leave. If he sees you, it's only going to hurt him more and he's been through enough." I would fight the Amazonian if I had to. At that stage, I was almost looking forward to it.

But Jade didn't want to jelly-wrestle apparently. "I'm sorry. I'm not here to break you guys up. I just... He called me the other day, or called my dad, but I was there, and he said some things, said he'd be coming here, and I just felt he deserved an explanation."

"And you couldn't pick up a phone?"

"I did, but he's not answering."

That much would have been true. Rupert's phone had been off since we'd stepped on the first plane in Melbourne. "Whatever you have to say, it's too little, too late. After everything you've done to him, you obviously don't give a damn about his feelings, and I'm not really inclined to let you see him just so you can assuage you own guilt with empty apologies."

Her tears fell now, and unlike me when I started crying, her face stayed angelic and unpuffy. "That's not it at all. I'll feel guilty until the day I die for what I did to him. I just wanted to see him, to check on him, because..."

"Because what?"

She met my fierce gaze with haunted eyes. "Because... I still..."

She couldn't finish the sentence, but it was there, clear as day. In her face was the same longing, the same attachment I saw in my own reflection when I'd been obsessing over Cody. She loved him, but there was so much fear in the way, it hung off her like a bulky Halloween costume.