For Her (The Girl I Loved Duet 1)

I get it. I get all of it.

But it’s not going to change the fact that she and I are supposed to be together. I’ve never felt so certain about anything. It’s bone deep, and the feeling isn’t going to go away. I know she still feels something for me—I can see it when she looks at me sometimes, when she lets her guard down.

And God, just touching her, I’ve been living in the past for hours now, remembering everything that happened and imagining just how good it would be now.

Soon, too soon, we arrive at her apartment. Which sucks because I’m not ready to leave her. Not yet. She’s in pain and tired and I want to make sure that she’s okay. I really want so much more than that but I’ll take what I can get.

“You have your keys?” I ask as I lift her out of the car.

“Yeah. Number twenty.”

Up one flight of stairs and down the hall of the building, we arrive at her door, and she fumbles with the lock. I push the door open with my foot, and navigate as best I can in the darkness. Couch. There. Perfect. I set her down gently and hunt for the light switch.

“Thank you,” she says before I can find it. “You can go. You’ve done more than enough already.”

I’m glad it’s dark so she can’t see me shake my head. I just spent the better portion of the evening holding her in my arms. Feeling how well she fit and how warm she was. She smells like cinnamon and spices and if she thinks I’m just going to dump her on the couch and leave, she’s crazy.

I find the switch. It takes a second for my eyes to adjust, and then I look around. It’s a nice apartment, cozy, and I flash back to her childhood home. It has the same kind of vibe of being casually lived in. “I like your place.”

Amber looks around like she’s suddenly seeing it for the first time. “It’s okay. A bit small, and I’ve got really loud and in love upstairs neighbors.”

I laugh. “Too much love?”

“If they kept it to the bedroom it would be fine,” she says, rolling her eyes, “But it’s in every room. All the time.”

“Passionate.”

“Yeah, it’s what I can afford right now. Hasn’t been the easiest year.” She shrugs.

This isn’t in the nicest part of town, and it is a little bit smaller, but it’s not a bad place. And not something she should be struggling to afford, not being the director of something like Undercover. “What’s made it hard?”

The anger in her eyes is back. “You don’t just get to sweep back into my life after ten years and know everything, Peter. That’s not how this works. I know that you think we can just pick everything back up where we left it, or before we left it, but we can’t.”

“Of course we can’t do that,” I say, “but that doesn’t mean we can’t re-learn.”

Amber scrubs her hands over her face. “Peter. This job has to go perfectly. Do you get that? For all your talk about understanding how hard it is to be a woman in this industry, you don’t know. You don’t actually understand because you haven’t been there. And the shitty truth is that we don’t usually get second chances. So there can’t be any mistakes. It has to go well. It has to. So please just go.”

She glances at me when she says the word mistake, and somehow it both hurts me and gives me hope. I sit next to her on the couch and grab the blanket from the back of it. Moving the coffee table closer, I help her lift her leg onto it so that it’s elevated before covering her with a blanket.

“Peter, what is this?”

“What is what?”

She lifts and drops her hands in frustration. “All of this. You helping me, constantly being there, telling me you’re going to make me fall in love with you. Is it some kind of guilt? Making up for the past or something? Is it because you can’t stand the fact that someone might not want you anymore? Even if it’s not any of those things, you need to stop trying.”

“I can’t,” I say, sitting next to her on the couch, pushing aside the fact that she thinks I might be trying to pursue her for revenge.

“But why?” She looks at me, and her eyes are desperate for answers.

“Because, even after everything,” I say, “I’ve never met anyone who makes me feel the way you do. Never. And I’d be crazy if I let that slip through my fingers again.”

Leaning closer to her, I test her reaction, but she doesn’t cringe or pull away. There’s no anger in her face or in her eyes, just confusion and desperation and need. There’s still something between us, I can feel it, like a thread tying us together, pulling in my gut.