It didn’t look like it, which only made me want to stand by his side even more.
I glared at Andy. “If you love him the way you say you do, shouldn’t you want him to be happy, no matter who it’s with?”
“Phoebe, I’m warning you?—”
Henry pushed against Andy’s bare chest so hard, Jace had to duck, and Andy barely stayed on two feet. “You don’t get to warn her about shit,” Henry bit out as he stepped up to him. A giant against a smaller man playing with fire. A modern-day David versus Goliath. Only this time, I wanted Goliath to win.
David could go fuck himself.
Sometimes the bigger man needed to beat the little guy with the big mouth down.
“You gonna hit me, Cohen?” Andy taunted, pulling himself back to full height again.
Instead, Henry worked the muscles in his jaw and said nothing.
“Over someone like her?” Andy scoffed.
“Keep. Her. Out of this,” Henry warned.
“Why? Does she matter to you or something?”
I took a step closer, about to interject, when Henry beat me to it. “You want to know the truth? I’ll give you the truth—all of it. She fucking matters, okay? She matters more than I ever thought she would.”
Everyone froze at his admission, while all I could do was stare at Henry, wide-eyed and suddenly breathless as goosebumps rose all over my body.
I mattered to him.
This thing between ushadmeant something.
“Is that what you wanted to hear, Andy?” Henry went on. “You want to know that we’ve been hooking up? That I can’t keep my damn hands off her? That everything I thought I didn’t want on this holiday, I now want with her? You want to know about the nights we’ve been sneaking around? About the way I’ve held her hand around half this island, kissed her everywhere? You want to know about the secrets we’ve made together?”
“You son of a…” But he at least had the decency to trail off before he finished that particular insult as he continued to stare up at Henry and shook his head. “You’d really sacrifice our friendship for this?”
“If this is what breaks us, it isn’t much of a friendship, is it?”
“After everything we’ve done for you.”
“My happiness is not for sale, Andy. It never has been. If you’re asking me to stay miserable for the rest of my life because it’s a debt I owe you, I can’t give you that.”
“You think I want you to be miserable?”
“I think you want to keep punishing me for the mistakes I made with Lillie, yeah. You know full well who I am and what I stand for. You know I never meant to hurt her.”
“Hurt her? You broke her heart, Cohen. She’s been fucking miserable for months because of you!”
“And I’ve apologised over and over and over and over. I brought you on this trip to make you happy. I’ve given everything I can to you, Nina and James, even to Lillie. Fuck, especially Lillie. I’ve shown you all the regrets I have, and I can’t do any more than that. I just can’t. Not without breaking myself apart in the process. Is that really what you want?”
“She’s my fucking sister, you bast?—”
“Woah, woah, woah, woah, now.” Jace, using force he hadn’t shown before, somehow wormed his way between the pair of them again and used all his strength to push them apart. “I’ve just about had enough from the both of you.”
Jace mumbled some other stuff to them under his breath, eyeing each of them with the same wary yet determined expression, but all I could hear were the same words on repeat in my mind, over and over again, as though nothing else mattered.
She fucking matters, okay.
She matters more than I ever thought she would.
“Just get me off this goddamn boat. I can’t bear to look at him a second longer,” Andy snapped, bringing me back to reality. Like a petulant child, he stormed off and made his way over to the netting of the catamaran, with Jace hot on his heels, leaving me, Henry, Bailey, and Rhea standing there, watching them go.
