“Oh, no. You’re not doing this.” I bite down the panic rising in my throat. “I won’t let you do this.”
She snorts, flipping her gaze to mine. It’s steeled, with an iciness to it I haven’t seen since that night way back when. “Me? What in the world am I doing, Cross?”
“You’re not giving me the benefit of the doubt.”
All I can see is her walking away from Crave that night years ago and feeling so hollow every minute of my life after. If she leaves again, I won’t survive it. I can’t re-invent myself again. I can’t trick myself into hoping it’ll all work out every morning when the sun comes up.
“No,” she says with a simple shrug. “I’m not, because I’ve been through this with you before and I don’t know why I thought it might be different this time. It’s not.”
“The hell it’s not!” I roar, taking a step back. “I fucking love you, Kallie. I’ve waited on you to come back for years and you tell me it’s not different? Maybe you’re not different, but I fucking am!”
She blanches, stepping away from me too. The corners of her eyes wet as she takes another step back. “Maybe we both are.”
My chest reverberates as I watch her take each step toward the door. With each inch of distance added between us, the air stagnates. A hollowness begins to form in my chest, and I know it will never fill this time.
“I love you,” I tell her, my voice the softest this gym has ever heard.
“Do you? Do you really?” There’s a fear in her eyes that chills me. “Or do you love what we were? Or what we could’ve been? Is it easier to settle for me because it’s the easiest solution?”
Her words hit my heart like a poisoned dart. I take a step back. “You think I’m settling for you?”
“Maybe.”
Forcing a swallow, I sigh. “You want to know something? I had this big thing worked up to tell you I loved you but then I thought it would be better to show you, to make you believe it so much you didn’t have to ask or wonder,” I admit. “Guess that failed.”
“I need time to think,” she says, her voice seeping with unshed tears. “I forgot what it’s like to date in a small town. It’s so damn hard.”
“It’s not hard if you love someone. You take the truth for the truth and the shit for what it is—shit.” My head nods as I pick up a clean towel. “I’ve never, ever cheated on you, Kal. Have I messed up? Sure. Should I have had Megan in my truck? Maybe not, but I’ve been alone for a long time and I forgot about dating in a small town too.”
“I hate this,” she says. “I hated the rumors then and I hate them now. Sitting there with Veronica acting like I don’t know some big secret is awful, Cross, and I’ve spent a lot of years in that position, whether you were really cheating on me or not. It hurts. It eats away at you.”
“And being accused over and over eats away at me too.” I wipe my face with the towel, scrubbing a little harder than necessary. “I can’t make you love me any more than you could change who I was back then. I changed because I wanted to, but I can’t make you love me if you don’t want to.”
Her tears fall. I want to go to her and hold her and kiss them away, but I don’t. I leave her to them. She’s the one who wants to believe a stupid-as-shit reason enough to warrant them falling.
The last time she cried in front of me, I didn’t see her again. The reality of that pain rips through my chest and it’s unbearable.
Before she can leave me again, I turn away from her and head into the back room.
Twelve
Cross
“I told you.” Walker kicks back on the sofa in his living room with a look I’d like to knock off his face. While I’m ninety-five percent sure I could take him, the five percent isn’t a risk I want to take tonight. “If they wanna go, let ’em go.”
“This is such bullshit,” I spit out, grabbing a beer off the coffee table. “I didn’t do anything with Megan fucking McCarter. Not at any point in my life have I ever even touched her.”
“I have.” He grins. “But good choice not to—it’s not worth it.”
Every inch of my skin itches. It’s uncomfortable, making me feel like I need to move, to run, to rip something to shreds.
“I’m caught between a rock and a hard place,” I comment, more to the universe as a whole rather than to Walker specifically. “As pissed as I am right now, I know she’s the girl I was meant to have. If I don’t go after her, I’ll lose her, but if I do, doesn’t that make me look guilty? Or like a pussy? Or set the stage for a power vacuum in our relationship?”