Chapter 44 – 7 minutes

Nef’s POV


Seven minutes was all it took to nearly destroy my world. Seven minutes to shatter my heart into a million pieces. Seven minutes to undo all that I believed in. All I could think was “he slept with her.” He cheated on me. He lied to me. He…I…I can’t…
I was hurt and angry. I cursed and screamed and cried. I told him I hated him. I told him that he was a liar. That he was…oh God the things I said to him. Jesse intervened. She called him. They were friends so she wanted to know what happened. She wanted to curse him out. It turned out that it had been a lie. Nadiya had lied. I’d called Sasha late one night. I expected him to be asleep but Nadiya had answered the phone. She shouldn’t have been the one answering his phone. She told me that she was in his bed. That he told her that we’d broken up. That things hadn’t worked out between us.

”I’m so sorry,” she said. ”I wouldn’t have slept with him if I had known that you two were still together. I thought - ”

She offered to wake him up so that he could explain but I hung up the phone. I threw my phone against my bedroom wall and the glass screen shattered with the force of it. When I did finally talk to him I was livid. Sadness at his betrayal had turned to anger. He denied it. He acted like he had been blindsided. He had been blindsided. He didn’t have a clue what was going on.

It was hard to believe that someone would do something like that. That someone could be so conniving and vindictive. Stuff like this doesn’t happen in the real world; it only happens in the movies…or so I thought.

I’m such an idiot.

”Don’t ever do that again. If there is ever a time that you don’t trust me, please talk to me.”

Sasha had never given me a reason not to trust him. There were times when he missed the obvious, when he was too trusting to the people around him, but he had never given me a reason not to trust him. He’d never given me a reason to not have faith in him.

This had been the first big thing to rock my relationship with Sasha. We’d had tiffs, misunderstandings, and disagreements before but we have never fought. I didn’t like it. I don’t like fighting. I don’t like arguing. I never wanted something like this to happen again.

Sasha said that he wasn’t angry with me. He said that he understood what happened and how I could react the way I did. Had the situation been reversed he probably would have done the same thing. He was hurt that I hadn’t trusted him. We both had underestimated Nadiya. They’d been such good friends. I could understand her attraction to him but she crossed the line. She was manipulative and sneaky. When Sasha didn’t respond to her come ons she slow upped the ante; touching him, constantly being around him, kissing him, and finally trying to run me out of the picture.

It sucked being away from him right now. I wanted nothing more than to be able to pull him into my arms and hold him. I wanted the physical reassurance that he was still mine. I would be seeing him shortly. We were going to Egypt together. After the almost two months we went without seeing each other at the beginning of the off season we met up once a month. For June we’d spent a week in Vegas, for July I spent almost two weeks in Russia, and for August we’d spend a week in Egypt. He’d be back in DC by mid September.

”Tell me you love me,” he said one night on the phone.

“I love you.”

”Tell me you trust me.”

“I trust you.”

“Please remember that.”