Page 4 of All the Beautiful Things
I didn’t need to look at the photo.
I needed her to give me a minute, a minute I absolutely didn’t deserve, and God, I could only imagine what she was thinking.
Especially after last night.
“Lilly,” I said her name, and it was all I could choke out.
There were no reasonable explanations for this. Scum. I was scum. I didn’t think it was possible for me to feel shittier about myself.
“You know her?!” she shrieked.
She might as well have slammed that glass into my face. It would hurt mildly less than seeing her like this.
I stepped toward her, palms out, trying to calm her even though it was futile. Nothing would calm the maelstrom of emotions whipping through the air, sucking us into its vortex right now.
Still. I tried. “Please. Let me explain.”
“Who is this!?” She screamed so loud I flinched. It was a wonder the glass didn’t shatter in her hand.
God. This was not at all… not at all what I wanted to happen. Yet, I’d predicted it.
I saw the end of us before we ever began. Now I was staring down that barrel without any decent way to explain myself.
Not after last night.
This never should have happened. In my darkest nightmares of having to explain to Lilly everything, I’d never anticipated this.
The frame fell from her hand and clattered to the table. It might as well have been a gong, signaling the end of a beginning I never should have allowed to have happen.
This was my fault.
I should have kept my distance.
“Lilly. Please. I know… I get what you’re thinking—”
“You don’t know shit, Hudson.” She spit it out with such venom.
Could she see how much this was killing me?
How much it hurt to know I’d caused the devastation testing her features?
No. She was lost in her own despair and fury, not that I could blame her.
“Or hell, you know everything, don’t you? Who is this girl to you!”
Her scream rattled the walls and sent a freezing ice to my veins. It chilled me straight to the bone, past that to my marrow, aimed for my soul.
“It’s Melissa,” I choked out, although she already knew that. “My sister.”
She stumbled back. Her hands flailed in the air until she barely stopped herself from falling by gripping the edge of the couch.
“Your… sister?” Tears poured from her and her face paled until she was ghost white. “Likesistersister?”
It felt like I was killing her. Pain. remorse. Sorry… I was hurting her and it’d all been because of my choices. I’d never felt like less of a man.
“I know—”
“You have a sister?”
