as his hand met my face, his thumb brushing over my skin as he stepped even closer and peered down at me. “I love you. I’ve always loved you. And I don’t know when exactly that love changed, or why it had me acting like more of a dickhead than normal, but I know it wasn’t recent. I know I’d be lying if I tried to say it was all brand new.” His throat bobbed. “Because it’s not new. What’s new is that I can finally recognize what I feel and admit it.”
I felt my heart beating through every limb, every vein, and every breath as I absorbed what he’d just said. “You …” I couldn’t even talk, my vocal cords had become cotton candy—flimsy, unreliable, and too damn soft.
Dash nodded, his thumb reaching my bottom lip and grazing beneath it, eyes tracking the connection. “Yeah, no more bullshit. I’ve always said what I mean and mean what I say.” His lips twitched. “Until it came to admitting how I felt about you. Which says something in and of itself, yeah?”
My lashes drooped to his lip, where a tiny cut still resided from his brawl with Byron. I wanted so badly to absolve him of all that’d happened, but as I stared at that lip, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about Kayla. “You knew you loved me, yet you were okay with having sex with someone else?”
His lips tightened, and his thumb ceased moving. “There’s not a lot I can say besides I’m sor—”
“You’re sorry, yes, we’ve established that. But Dash”—I laughed, backing up and losing his touch—“I couldn’t go any further with Byron because it made me sick. Because I was beginning to think that maybe I was in love with you, too.”
“Peggy, fuck.” His hands balled at his sides. “I want this. Us. More than anything else in the world. And if we could just start over, you know I’d never do that—”
“But I wouldn’t be able to forget.” I squared my shoulders, infusing enough steel to straighten my spine and strengthen my voice. “I can’t forget what it felt like to see you in that bed with her, of all people.”
He came toward me, but I backed away. He stopped, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I-I don’t even know what to say. I was fucked up, and I fucked up, but I’m not the type to wait around for someone to decide they finally want me, Peggy.” A harsh laugh erupted. “I’m the type who’ll fuck someone else to help me forget someone else. And we weren’t together. I never thought we’d speak again.”
Tears dripped, and I flicked them away, my heart squeezing. “While that may be true, it’s all too big a mess now. So there’s really no point in having this conversation.”
“There is,” he ground out through a tight jaw. “There is because we’re us. We couldn’t live without each other even if we didn’t fall for each other, and now we definitely can’t.”
“You didn’t feel that way forty-eight hours ago,” I had to remind him.
He tossed his arms out. “Because I hated your fucking guts forty-eight hours ago. You destroyed me, Peggy. If I’m being honest, knowing you were making out with him, knowing he touched your cunt in that limo is still destroying me.”
I flinched. “See?” Emotion smeared my voice, tainting my vision. “Just go. We’re wasting our time and only making this worse.”
“No time with you is wasted even when we’re breaking.”
My fingers curled, nails striking my palms. “I don’t want to break anymore. I want you to leave.”
“Over Kayla? Come on,” he said. “We’re more than this bullshit.”
How he so easily discarded the pain that he’d caused from his actions had something dark and all-consuming cracking open inside me. “Don’t you dare belittle how I feel.” I was seething, my teeth clacking. “But you would because that’s what you do. You’re Dash Thane, right? The boy who ignores how others feel and does and says whatever he wants, and forever gets away with it.”
His nostrils flared. “That’s not fucking true.”
“It is. It is fucking true. But not this time.” I marched to the door, flinging it open. “Get out.”
He didn’t move. “This is a mistake. We’ve both made enough mistakes. Can we please not make anymore and, instead, find a way to move past this?” His eyes were begging, but his words were far from enough.
My laughter cracked and ebbed in the air around us. “Go, Dash. Now.”
“No, just