It’s Not That I Didn’t Wait, It’s That You Never Chose Me Chapter 08

It’s Not That I Didn’t Wait, It’s That You Never Chose Me Chapter 08

It rained all night.

By the time Adrian made it back to the city on the first morning bus, he was drenched through, burning with fever, and half-blind with a splitting headache.

The moment he opened the front door, a sharp wave of stale alcohol hit him in the face.

The living room was trashed.

Takeout boxes were scattered everywhere. A few bleached-haired punks were sprawled across the couch in twisted sleeping heaps. And the door to Adrian’s study stood wide open.

Fighting off the dizziness, he stumbled straight inside.

Bryce was sitting in Adrian’s desk chair, grinning, with a stack of Adrian’s research drafts in his hands. He had torn them into strips and was folding them into paper airplanes.

“Hey, Adrian, you’re back,” Bryce said with an easy, shameless smirk.

Something in Adrian snapped clean through.

“What the hell are you doing?”

He lunged forward and ripped the shredded papers out of Bryce’s hands.

Those weren’t random notes. They were the core data drafts for a federally funded research grant proposal Adrian had been preparing to submit the following month.

Bryce rolled his eyes. “Relax. They’re just papers. I couldn’t find scratch paper for my lyrics, so I grabbed a few.”

“Get out.”

Adrian’s eyes were bloodshot, savage, almost unrecognizable. He grabbed Bryce by the front of his shirt, dragged him all the way to the door, and hurled him outside.

The other boys screamed and scrambled after him, tripping over themselves in their rush to get out.

Half an hour later, Vanessa stormed in.

The second she crossed the threshold, she started shrieking.

“Adrian, have you lost your mind? What if Bryce hurt his fingers when you threw him out? How’s he supposed to play guitar? How’s he supposed to go to his interview tomorrow?”

Adrian leaned against the doorframe and looked at her with open disgust.

For three years, this was the woman he had protected like she was something precious, the one he had kept close in the softest corner of his heart.

But now, looking at her red-faced tantrum, at the ugly way she screamed, all he felt was revulsion.

“Interview?” Adrian laughed, his voice scraped raw. “He destroyed data tied to a federally funded research application. I already called the police.”

Vanessa froze.

The blood drained from her face. “You… what did you just say? You’re going to ruin Bryce’s future?”

“He ruined my home first,” Adrian said, his voice colder than ice. “Take your useless brother and get the hell out of my life.”

Vanessa stared at the naked disgust in his eyes and finally realized it.

The man she had been using at will, calling whenever she wanted something, taking and taking and taking from, he had finally spun out of her control.

She bit down hard on her lip, turned, and ran.

The front door slammed shut behind her.

At last, the apartment went silent.

A dead, ringing kind of silence.

Adrian slid down the wall and collapsed onto the floor.