“Okay, let’s just sit down and take a breather,” Sullivan suggests, leading me to the sectional. We sit down, and Banks and Oliver follow suit. Oliver sits next to me, leaving me wedged between him, and Sullivan, while Banks sits down on the recliner.
A long, tense moment of silence fills the room, and all I can think about is what they are going to do next. How long can they keep me here? How long before someone notices I’m missing? They haven’t actually hurt me, and they’ve already had plenty of opportunities to do so, so maybe they are telling the truth, at the very least about that.
“Hypothetically speaking… say I do believe you… that you do want to help me and keep me safe from some unknown threat. Why? You already admitted to hating me at one point. Why not anymore? What changed that?”
“Well,” Banks snickers and I swear he gets even more handsome when he smiles. “You. You kind of changed that all on your own. We weren’t lying when we said we were out for revenge. I guess we never accounted for that hate to turn into something else, something that started to look a lot less like hate. We each spent a lot of time with you, and I guess you grew on us, in more than one way.” A mischievous grin appears on his lips, and it tells me that he is talking about something besides friendship.
“Oliver said we were just friends.”
“I don’t think friends do what we did,” Banks chuckles.
My eyes dart between all three of them. They can’t really be saying what I think they’re saying, can they?
“I….” My cheeks heat and a boulder the size of Texas starts to form in my throat. That guy from the party, he said I was into threesomes. Assuming what they’re saying is true, then he was right?
“Did I… Did I sleep with all three of you?” I cringe as I ask the question, though there’s a tiny spark, a tiny flame of curiosity that flickers inside of me. Ashamed, I bury my face in my hands. This is wrong, so wrong.
“You didn’t sleep with all three of us. Only Sullivan.” Oliver speaks through his teeth, his tone, filled with venom, signifying his distaste over the subject. Dropping my hands from my face, I turn to face Sullivan.
Shame and guilt mix inside his ocean blue eyes and I know immediately that there is more to this story than what they’re telling me.
“Tell me. What happened?”
“I don’t think now is the right time to talk about this,” Sullivan interjects before anyone can say anything.
“Why’s that?” Oliver hisses like a snake, and Sullivan’s gaze turns to steel, his jaw clenching so tight you could cut glass on the edge of it.
“You know why,” he grits out.
“Yeah ‘cause it would paint you in a shit light, and god forbid that happens,” Oliver snarls, and I notice that he’s vibrating with rage, his entire body tense. “I’m going outside before I do something stupid.”
Oliver tries to get up, but I grab his arm pulling him back. “Don’t go.” I’m not sure what compels me to say it and with the feeling behind it, but as soon as the words are out, Oliver relaxes next to me. “Please tell me what happened… all of it. The good and the bad. I want to remember it, but I can’t, so I need you to tell me.”
“We followed you to Bayshore, we wanted to mess with you, try to sabotage your school year, maybe even get you expelled,” Oliver starts explaining. “We followed you around, spread rumors…” His voice trails off, shame filling his eyes at the memory.
“Then we got close, really close,” Banks continues. “We actually got to know you, and we were working on forgiving you, but then you betrayed us again… or so we thought.”
“You denied setting us up again,” Sullivan says as if he’s lost in thought, “at the end, Banks and Oliver believed you, but I didn’t… I was so caught up in my own anger, so caught up in feeling like we had given you the knife to stab us all over again, that I secretly filmed us having sex.”
My eyes go wide at his confession, my heart all but lurching from my chest.
Filmed us having sex?
My mouth pops open, and I don’t know if I’m angry, shocked, or ashamed.
“Why? Why would you do that?”
Sullivan blinks, his eyes finding mine. “I was angry, I thought you’d made me fall for you as part of a plot against us. I had no idea you were so innocent. I was going to publish the video for all to see, show you as the dirty slut I thought you were, but I didn’t. I swear to you that I didn’t, nobody ever saw it. I knew the second that I saw the blood on your thighs, it was me who had wronged you. Both of our parents wanted to ensure we remained enemies, and I had gobbled that bullshit right up. They had me eating right out of their hands.” Shaking his head, he looks away, as if he couldn’t take looking at me any longer.