At First Sight - Nicholas Sparks [47]
“And what do I think?” Jeremy demanded. “That my fiancée shouldn’t be at another man’s house? That maybe she should have told me where she was going? That if she trusted me, she would have said something? That if she cared about me, she wouldn’t have broken our dinner date to spend time with another man?”
“This isn’t about you!” she said. “And I didn’t break our date. I asked if we could do it tomorrow and you said it would be fine!”
Jeremy inched closer. “This isn’t just about the dinner, Lexie. This is about the fact that you went to another man’s house tonight.”
Lexie stood her ground. “And what? Do you think I slept with Rodney? Do you think we spent the last hour making out on the couch? We talked, Jeremy! That’s all we did. Just talked! Doris was getting tired, and before I went home, I wanted to know if Rodney could tell me what was going on. So I stopped by, and all we did was talk about Rachel.”
“You should have told me.”
“I would have! And you wouldn’t have even had to ask. I would have told you where I went. I don’t keep secrets from you.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Oh no? What about that day at the boardwalk?”
“What day at the boardwalk?”
“Last month when I saw you holding Rodney’s hand.”
She stared at him as if she had never seen him before. “How long have you been spying on me?”
“I haven’t been spying! But I did see you holding his hand.”
She continued to stare at him. “Who are you?” she finally asked.
“Your fiancé,” Jeremy said, his voice continuing to rise, “and I think I deserve an explanation. First, I find you two holding hands, then I find out that you’re breaking our dates to spend time with him—”
“Shut up!” she shouted. “Just be quiet and listen.”
“I’m trying to listen!” he shouted back. “But you’re not telling me the truth! You’ve been lying to me!”
“No, I haven’t!”
“No? Then why not tell me about your little hand-holding adventure!”
“I’m trying to tell you that you’re making this into something it isn’t—”
“Oh, really?” he snarled, cutting her off. “And what if you had caught me holding hands with an ex-girlfriend and found out that I was sneaking away to spend time with her?”
“I wasn’t sneaking away!” Lexie said, throwing up her hands. “I told you . . . I stayed with Doris almost all night, but I still wasn’t sure what was going on. I was worried about Rachel, so I stopped by Rodney’s to find out if he knew anything.”
“After holding his hand, of course.”
Lexie’s eyes flashed, but as she spoke he could hear her voice beginning to break. “No,” she said, “I didn’t. We sat on the porch out back and talked. How many times do I have to tell you this?”
“Maybe enough to admit that you were lying!”
“I wasn’t lying!”
He stared at her, his voice taking on a hard edge. “You lied, and you know it.” He pointed an accusing finger at her. “That’s bad enough, but that isn’t the only thing that hurts. What hurts worse is that you keep trying to deny it.”
With that, he stepped off the porch and strode to his car, not bothering to look behind him.
Jeremy sped blindly through town, not knowing what to do. He knew he didn’t want to go back to Greenleaf, nor could he imagine heading to the Lookilu Tavern, the only bar still open in town. Though he’d stopped in once or twice, he had no desire to spend the rest of the evening seated at the bar, simply because he knew the ruckus it would cause. If he’d learned one thing about small towns, it was that news traveled fast, especially bad news, and he had no desire to have anyone else in town start speculating about him and Lexie. Instead, he simply drove through town, making a big circuit, without any destination in mind. Boone Creek was not New York City—there was no place to go if one wanted to vanish into a crowd. There were no crowds.
Sometimes he hated this town.
Lexie could talk all she wanted about the beautiful scenery and townsfolk she viewed almost as family, but he supposed he should have expected that. As an only child and an orphan to boot, she’d never been part of a large family as Jeremy had been, and he sometimes felt like telling her that