Truly (New York 1)

This was what he got for kissing a woman who bottled things up. Now she was bottling up her reaction, shoving it away where he didn’t have access to it, and he was feeling too much.

He had to fix this. Put them back where they’d been before, where he was being nice and she was safe and easy to be around. Because when he felt the way he felt right now—nothing good ever came of this. He got too overwrought, and then he fucked up even worse, and people did what May was doing.

He caught her at a jog and grabbed her arm, but she pulled it out of his grip.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I was angry.”

“I noticed.”

“I wanted you to—”

To what?

To make it go away.

Oh fuck. He’d used her. He’d tried to pop her like a pill, medicate away all the negative shit in his head with the closest convenient body.

You don’t do that anymore, asshole.

Except apparently he did.

Still no reaction from May. Not a word, and she wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t stop walking, wouldn’t tell him a goddamn thing. “I promise I won’t do it again.”

Her frown deepened.

“It wasn’t about you.”

She rocked to a stop, whirling on him, and for a moment, he saw everything she was feeling on her face. Surprise and anger and pain. Severe, gut-wrenching disappointment.

Then it was gone. All the energy and feeling that had been propelling her down the street evaporated. She sank to the curb between two parked cars and wrapped her arms around her knees.

After a moment’s pause in which he couldn’t figure out what to say or do, she turned her face away, and he heard her sniffle. She lifted a hand to wipe her face.

Crying.

He’d made her cry.

God, he was an ass.

He wanted to put his arm around her, but if he’d even had that right, he’d forfeited it. “Don’t cry,” he said. He sat down beside her. “It’s all my fault.”

She made this noise—this horrible noise that sounded as though it had forced its way up from the bottom of her soul. Her back shuddered, and she began to sob—really sob, a wretched, violent sound that made him want to run anywhere, to do anything other than sit here and listen.

“Shh,” he said. Trying to be soothing, though he didn’t have a clue how anyone could pull it off. How anyone could stand this. He inched closer until his thigh touched hers, because even though he shouldn’t touch her, he couldn’t leave her alone, either. Not when she was so miserable. “Shh, May-Belle.”

His hand lifted of its own accord and began stroking up and down her back, but that seemed to make her sob harder, so he stopped. His hand came to rest on the back of her neck.

“Go ahead and cry, then,” he said, because shushing her wasn’t working, and he’d begun to understand that this wasn’t normal crying—this was something else.

Mourning. Purging.

This was a woman who’d put up a good front through two extraordinarily shitty days finally letting out all the emotions she’d been suppressing.

You asked for it, Hausman.