Chapter 22: False Hope

Chapter 22: Chapter 22: False Hope

"What we owe each other? You’re not trying to tell me to be responsible for Vanessa are you?" He said her name like it tasted bad in his mouth.

"Yes." Iris nodded. "Don’t tell me.... you’ve fucked her for so long and you were not even going to be responsible for her?"

Jason let out a bitter laugh, his grip on her wrist loosened and he dragged both hands through his hair before looking at her again.

"Responsible?" he repeated, the word dripping with disbelief. "Responsible my ass."

Shawn glanced sideways at him, as if silently warning him to lower his voice, but Jason was too worked up to notice.

"You want to know the truth about Vanessa, Iris? She was the one who kept coming after me, Iris. From the very beginning." His jaw clenched so tightly that the muscles twitched beneath his skin.

"She’s the one who put something in my drink and got me drunk... deliberately. She made sure I wasn’t thinking straight, and that’s how everything started. That time was the first that I ever slept with her."

Iris stared at him, for a long moment, she couldn’t find her voice.

"What..." Her brows knitted together. "What are you saying?"

Jason stepped closer, desperation replacing some of the anger in his expression.

"I’m telling you the truth."

He held her gaze as though willing her to believe him.

"And after it happened, Vanessa admitted it herself. I confronted her after I found out what she’d done, and she didn’t even try to deny it. She had the nerve to tell me I needed to break things off with you. She’s been trying to tear us apart from the very start."

Iris felt the words sink into her like stones. "What?" The word came out of Iris before she could stop it, all the venom draining out of her voice, replaced by pure confusion. "Vanessa admitted that?"

Jason nodded. "Every single bit of it."

She searched his face for the lie, for the tell she knew so well — the way his left eye twitched slightly when he was bending the truth. It wasn’t there.

Jason rubbed a hand over his face, exhaustion showing through the frustration.

"And yesterday — I swear to you, I tried to get to the restaurant after your text came through. But after the game the team had an after-party, and it was still going on when I got another text from you that you’ve arrived at the restaurant."

His shoulders slumped.

"But Coach wouldn’t let me leave, and he practically ordered me to stay, said if the captain bailed early it would tank the team’s morale and everyone else would lose interest too. So I stayed. I tried calling you to explain."

He pulled out his phone instinctively before remembering it no longer mattered.

"I called a lot of times, but the call wouldn’t go through. I also sent messages, but they wouldn’t go through either. I thought maybe your battery had died," Jason continued quietly. "Then Vanessa came over and told me you’d already left."

"Wait.... Vanessa was at the after-party?" Iris asked him stunned.

"Yes. There were women at the party too," he continued, his voice tightening. "Including your good friend Vanessa. She told me you’d already left, that you hadn’t waited very long, She told me not to worry, that I should just relax, that you’d probably gone home angry and I’d be better off sorting it out with you in the morning."

His expression darkened. "My texts weren’t sending, your number wasn’t going through, so I... I believed her."

Shawn sighed quietly beside the Porsche, clearly having heard this story more than once.

"She stayed at the party with the guys." He stopped, jaw working like the next part physically hurt to say.

"And then things just — happened. I had lots of alcohol and somehow, i ended up back in bed with her again and then you arrived. I didn’t plan it, Iris. I didn’t ignore you on purpose."

For a moment, Iris just stood there, turning the pieces over in her mind, feeling something like nausea at how far Vanessa had apparently been willing to go. But underneath the disgust was a strange, hollow realization — it didn’t actually change anything. Whatever twisted game Vanessa had been playing, Jason had still been an active, willing participant in his own unraveling.

She let out a slow breath. "Honestly, Jason? Maybe that’s all true... everything you just said."

Jason looked up hopefully.

"But it doesn’t change anything and I don’t even care why anymore."

His hopeful expression faltered.

Iris shook her head, something almost like a laugh escaping her. "What’s done is done. I’ve already moved on."

"Moved on," Jason repeated flatly, like the phrase didn’t compute.

"Last night, after I watched you and Vanessa put on your little show, Zoey took me to a club. I met someone there. Someone I tried very, very hard to forget you with."

She paused just long enough for him to understand where the conversation was heading. She tilted her chin up, meeting his eyes dead on.

"And I did. I slept with him last night, Jason."

The color seemed to drain out of his face all at once. His eyes dropped to the coat again, and this time his nostrils flared as he stared at it like it had personally wronged him.

"Is that his?" His voice had gone low and strange.

Behind him, Shawn went rigid, pushing off the car and moving a few careful steps closer, watching Jason the way you’d watch a pot about to boil over.

"Easy, Jason," Shawn said, his tone even, deliberate. "Just breathe. Don’t let it get the better of you."

Iris let out a short, humorless laugh. "Get the better of him? Why would he even have the right to be angry?"

She turned back to Jason, eyes narrowing. "You spent the last five minutes asking me to understand why you cheated. And now that you find out I slept with someone, suddenly you’re the injured party?"

"Who is he?" Jason’s voice cracked through the space between them, rougher now. "Who the fuck is he, Iris?"

"I don’t know," she said simply, and meant it. "He was just a stranger. A one-night thing. That’s all it was."

"You actually—" He couldn’t even finish the sentence, just stared at her like the words were physically difficult to form.

To settle the matter once and for all, Iris shrugged the coat off her shoulders and let it drop, exposing what it had been hiding — The faint marks along her neck were no longer hidden.

Whatever hope Jason had been holding onto visibly died in that instant and his expression changed instantly....something darker crossing it as he leaned in, nostrils flaring — like he was catching a scent that didn’t belong there, something underneath her perfume, faint and strange and wrong.

The unfamiliar scent lingering around Iris struck him harder than anything she’d said. Someone else had been close enough to touch her and leave his presence all over her.

His face drained of color before anger rushed in to replace it and his hands curled into fists. His jaw clenched hard enough that a muscle jumped along it.

"You wouldn’t let me touch you." His voice shook now, rage bleeding through every syllable. "But you let some stranger put his hands all over you?"