Above and Beyond (Twist of Fate 4)

“Good,” I said under my breath but Zach must have heard me because he smiled briefly. I found myself getting lost in that smile of his all over again until it suddenly hit me why he was telling me all of this.

“You’re not like him!” I blurted. I was in his space a second later. “You don’t use people like that—”

Zach silenced me by putting a finger to my lips. I forced myself to grit my teeth together so I wouldn’t open my mouth again. Zach’s finger drifted along my lip for a second, then over the curve of my jaw.

“I wanted you from the moment I saw you, Lucky. Thankfully, I’m not so far gone that I’d ever dream of laying my hands on a teenager, but I’m not a saint either.”

I nodded in understanding. He’d wanted me, but he hadn’t wanted to be with me.

“It took me a long time after Mitch to be with another man. I ended up dating primarily women for a while. When I did hook up with a guy for the first time after Mitch, I took control from the start. Everything was on my terms. And I loved it. So I did it again, and again… with men and with women. I made sure my partners got what they wanted, but I also made sure they understood I was only interested in sex.” Zach paused and ran his finger down my throat. I shivered in response.

“I know you desperately want to believe I’m not like him, Lucky,” Zach said softly. “But the truth is, I’m exactly like him.”

I began shaking my head. “No… no, you came back after I told you the truth about not having been with a guy before. You came back and you were slow and patient and loving—”

“And that’s why I walked out as soon as it was over,” Zach interrupted.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said in frustration because I could tell by the tone of his voice that nothing between us had changed.

“I wanted to be your first and I wanted it to be a good memory for you,” Zach explained.

Unlike the memory of his own first time. I kept the words to myself, though, because I knew he wasn’t telling me all of this so we could discuss it.

“It was,” I choked out. “It was perfect.”

To my surprise, Zach drew me into his arms and held me tight. “It was,” he admitted. We clung to each other for a moment before he put some space between us. “I shouldn’t have walked out on you like I did. I don’t regret anything else we did that night. But that moment… it made me wish things could be different. That I could be different.”

“But you can—”

Zach brushed his mouth over mine in the softest of kisses. I began to cry because I knew what it was.

“No, Zach, not like this. Don’t say goodbye like this. I can do better. I can be what you need—”

This time I was the one to cut myself off as I heard my own words. Hadn’t Zach just ripped his own guts open to show me how easy it had been for him to twist around who he was to become what Mitch had needed… all because he’d believed he’d loved the controlling bastard?

I shook my head. “I don’t mean like that. Not like what that asshole did to you.”

“Lucky, look at me,” Zach said. “Please,” he added when I refused to look up. When I did, his expression looked pained and I realized this had probably been the exact conversation he’d wanted to avoid after we’d had sex.

“I can’t be what you want… what you deserve. There’s not one damn thing about you that needs changing. It’s me. After what I went through, I’m… I’m broken. I can’t trust like that anymore, and you deserve someone who can give their whole self to you. Someone who isn’t jaded and fucked up. But I want you to know, I need you to know, I look at that night between us as my first time in a lot of ways too. I know that doesn’t make sense—”

“It does,” I said as I tried to blink back the tears. I wanted to triumph in the fact that all those little things that I thought I’d seen in him while we’d been making love hadn’t been just an act, but my heart was too busy fracturing into a hundred million little pieces. And I wanted to assure him that I loved him, broken or not. But I wasn’t going to talk him into something he clearly didn’t want.

Zach carefully extricated himself from my hold. “I’ll talk to Tag about bringing someone else in for the last couple of weeks of training. I know a couple of guys who might be able to help out—”