Not ever. She was on the verge of cutting her own pride to pieces over all this. Over the need to be with him. The desire to have him as her own.
Maybe she wasn’t strong, after all.
Maybe she was just a foolish girl.
This had all felt magical only a few moments ago, and now she just felt bedraggled.
“No,” she said. “Right. Just... Okay go then.”
“Iris...”
“No,” she said. “Don’t you dare apologize to me. It’s humiliating enough, throwing yourself at a man and being rejected. I... Thought men basically threw caution to the wind when it came to sex. Whether it’s a bad idea or not.”
“If it was just a bad idea for me, I might have. But it’s a worse idea for you, and that... That’s the problem.”
He started to walk out again.
“I thought you said I was strong?” Pathetic. On the verge of begging. Even that sounded plaintive and tragic to her own ears.
“You are,” he returned.
“Then why are you pretending that it’s me you’re protecting?” She didn’t know what had made her say that. But she knew it was true. She did. As sure as anything.
“I’m not pretending.”
She felt stronger then, buoyed by her realization. “You are. You’re protecting you. But that’s fine. Get out of my apartment.”
He didn’t have to be asked again. He nodded once, then went down the stairs, and when she heard the door close, she stumbled over to the couch and lay across it, her heart beating a steady rhythm of pain.
You’ve been through worse.
She had. She had been through much worse. But it didn’t help. Not now. Because this was bad enough.
So this was living.
Being an adult making mistakes. Living on your own.
She wasn’t sure she liked it.
She hadn’t told Ryder yet. Hadn’t told him she might move up here so she could always go back...always go home.
What she really wanted to do was go back to her brother’s house, curl up in a ball and sink into familiarity. She wanted the kitchen that she knew and her familiar bed. Wanted to be surrounded by her family. Wanted to hit rewind on the last hour.
But that would be losing for real. That was basically the only way she could lose. Quitting.
And she wasn’t going to quit.
That, in the midst of the pain, gave her a sense of determination. A sense that maybe it wasn’t quite so bad.
Because she wasn’t going home. She wasn’t letting his rejection decide what she was going to be.
She had changed. Her life had changed.
And as she lay there, coated in misery, she tried to let that matter.
At least she wasn’t stupid enough to fall for him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
HE WAS A damn fool. And he cussed himself the entire way back up toward Echo Pass. A damn fool. He should never have touched her. He should never have let her kiss him.
But he had. And he’d been... Consumed by it. Like it was a flame. Like it was everything.
Chocolate chip cookies had nothing on Iris Daniels’s mouth. If he could savor one thing for the rest of his life, it might be that.
It was the sweetest damn kiss he could remember.
And that made his head feel messed up. Made everything feel sideways.
He wasn’t married. He knew he wasn’t.
He pulled over, his heart pounding so hard that he felt sick.
There had been a time when he would have thought the kinds of emotions that he grappled with made him soft.
His dad had raised him to be a man’s man, after all. Stoic in all things. Strong. Not emotional. Not led around by anything half so fickle as feelings.
But that was before grief had become his second skin. That was before he’d cried rivers over things he couldn’t change. Tears hadn’t felt weak, not then. They’d left him hollowed out. Left his throat raw and his body in deep, unending pain.
Tears like that weren’t for the weak.
That was before he’d found out sorrow could make you sick and there was a kind of feeling that existed beyond that. A gray haze. Where you felt nothing. Couldn’t see the end of it. Couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.
You couldn’t work your way out of it, drink your way out of it. Couldn’t punch your way through it.
There was no being man enough.
No being enough at all.
And that was worse than the pain.
It was better to be retching your guts out on your front lawn, overcome by the dark, awful truth of your life, than it was to feel like