The CEO and Her Driver

Chapter 43

I am a firm believer that if I could freeze time... life would just get worse. We can already freeze moments in our own mind. Imagine if those moments... The worst moments of our lives could be frozen, zoomed in on, expanded to the size of a room. It would just shatter your heart over and over for hours until you could no longer bleed or feel. 

Sure, if you could freeze moments, you could freeze the good ones and just look at those, but most of us—well maybe just me, I would be tempted to stare at the bad. And that would make life torture. 

Why would you want to risk freezing a moment and tattoo it into your mind with far more detail when those details could come to haunt you at night, right before you fall asleep, demanding to be relived like a never-ending slideshow?

I could feel one of those moments forming, burning into my mind. Pausing just long enough for me to memorize Tate's face as he stared at his phone.

My heart stuttered and died as I watched him try to wrap his head around the image.

The photographer never wanted the image to go online at all... It was never going to be viral for the entire world to see, was it? It was taken just for him. Because being blindsided in the privacy of his own phone was so much more intrusive. It was so much worse. It hit so much harder. 

And I had never warned him. Never told him what happened. And now he had gotten the picture before I had a chance to say a word. My arms were wrapped fiercely around Laurence's neck, our lips locked, his hands pulling me closer. There was no denying it. There was no escaping it. I had kissed Laurence Royal back, and it was spilled out all over Tate's phone screen.

No...

We both stared at the picture in my dark room, side by side on my bed, a strong and painful silence stretching. 

The stretching pulled tighter, ripping at the scene that we had lived moments before, tainting our flirtations. 

Tighter, tainting my request for him to stay the night with me. 

Tighter, tainting my hopes that things may get better.

"I thought you hated Laurence Royal?" Tate asked in the dark, the phone glow vanishing, leaving me without a guide into what was going on in his mind. 

"I do," I insisted far too loudly. It sounded like a lie. And maybe I didn't hate his guts, but I had zero desire to kiss him, even if the image said otherwise.

I thought it was you... my heart screamed.

"That doesn't look like hate..." Tate said quietly.

I thought it was you... my heart screamed again, urging me to speak it into words.

"But I know images can be deceiving..." Tate added, after a pause. "I just..." Tate ran his hands through his hair, fingers catching the moonlight that slipped through my closed blinds. 

I thought it was you... my heart continued to scream over and over.

"Tate..." I turned on the bedside lamp, desperate to see his face.

He stood up, taking several steps away from the bed, away from me. "I need a minute."

"Okay," I said quietly, keeping an avalanche of panicked words back.

The minute he had requested was painful to watch. The look on his face changed, transforming from confusion, to hurt, to frustration, to anger, back to hurt, and teetering towards heartbreak. I wanted to say something, but I had promised him a moment and I needed to honor that. But that didn't stop my heart from screaming as I watched him think about the image over and over like his own personal torture slide show.