“But I’m the fragile one. You can take it, but I can’t.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t say that.”
“I’m better, you know. Taking my meds. I have a great job. Friends. All of that stuff is in the past.”
“I’m glad. I really am.”
“Then why the look? The frowny lines over your forehead?” He smoothed them with a hand subconsciously, before they delved into his hair.
“Seriously?” he asked. “I haven’t seen you in two years, Heaven. We went through a lot of shit together. Don’t forget I was the one—is it wrong for me to think maybe I need to take precautions?”
“I haven’t forgotten,” I said, well aware that he saved me that night in the ocean.
I wasn’t being fair though, I knew that. How would he know about my mental stability? How would he know I was doing well?
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re right, we did go through a lot of shi
t together and I desperately try to leave that in the past. I’m better. For real, and if I never said it or never said it enough, I appreciated everything you did for me.”
There was a beat of peace that flowed between us. Maybe that was why he’d been so angry. He was concerned? He’d never been one to handle his emotions appropriately.
He ran a hand through his hair. “I hate that it took Hayden getting hurt for me to see you again.”
I sat up on the couch, pulling the blanket with me. I jerked my head, implying but not asking for him to sit next to me. If I asked and he said no, I might crumble entirely.
He moved slowly, like he had to consider it—consider the ramifications—but crossed the room and sank down in the leather. “I never wanted any of this to happen between the five of us,” I said. “But you know as well as I do that things just weren’t the same.”
He didn’t respond.
“What we had together—the five of us—was special, but also so unique it existed in a fragile bubble. Careers, travel, life…none of us, especially me, knew how to make that work,” I confessed.
“And when that bubble burst, you ran.”
I frowned and shot him a look. “I didn’t run. Why do you keep saying that? We agreed to be apart. Completely apart.”
“No, you agreed to that and we gave you space. I came out here. Hayden joined the team. The guys built their business and you just…vanished.” His words cling to a hollow in my chest. “You know I still talk to them—almost every day. We text and call and all that shit you do when you’re close to one another.”
“But you were friends before me and it makes sense you’d be friends after. I didn’t know where I fit in that once…”
“Once we stopped having sex?” His tired green eyes surveyed me from the other side of the couch.
“Yeah. Isn’t that what all break-ups are about? Balancing the love of friendship and intimacy.” God, what we wove was so complicated. So very fragile and complicated. “And when you still—”
“Still what?”
I swallowed back the word love. “When you still care for someone, it’s impossible to see them without feeling the loss over and over again.”
He nodded in understanding and the tears that had been welling in my eyes for days started to spill. Anderson looked panicked by my sudden burst of emotion but sitting here with him, seeing Hayden—all the bruises and his injuries. It was all too much and I broke.
“Heaven,” he said, tears glistening in his own eyes. In a fuck-it-all move, he reached out for me and pulled me against his chest. It was wrong—so wrong, but it felt perfectly right. His firm chest, the weight of his arms, the thunderous pounding of his heart.
“I shouldn’t have brought it up. Not now,” he said, stroking my hair. “I’m just freaked out about Hayden. What he’s going to do while he recovers and if he’ll ever get to play again. They’re getting more and more strict on the head injuries—as they should—but it’s his whole life, especially since…”
“Since we broke up.” I completed the statement for him. “He has Sabine. He was moving on.”
Anderson grunted, arms tightening around me.
“We agree on one thing then,” I said, my tears having dried on his shirt.