I shook my head. “Why are we—?”
“Good question, Olivia. Why? Why can’t you be that for anybody? Why can’t you be happy?”
We hadn’t been together for weeks.
How had he figured so much of this out?
I cautiously tried to pull away.
His arms got tight and this time they didn’t loosen.
I stopped trying to pull away.
“We’re rewinding,” he decreed. “I know why you can’t be that for me. I know why I can’t share why you can’t be that for me. What I wanna know is why you think you can’t be that for me.”
“You can’t share and I get that. You have to get why I can’t share.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You have to.”
He bent close to me. “Your father is a piece of shit. Planet’d be better if he was obliterated from it. Not sure about your sister, but thinkin’ she’s much the same. Know you got soldiers who deserve a bed in the dirt.”
At his words, I wrenched in his arms but he held fast.
I again went still and kept my hands between us to give as much distance as he would afford me.
“That’s part of why I can’t have you. But you’re not about that. You’re not them. You haven’t shared that with me. I still know it down to my balls. You know it too ’cause you live it. So why won’t you let yourself have me?” he asked.
You’re not them.
Yes, he’d figured me out.
“Sebring—”
He lost it.
“Nick!” he thundered, giving me an abrupt, rough shake.
“Nick,” I whispered, pressing my hands into his chest, not to get away but in a gesture I hoped was soothing.
He stilled and the tumult of his eyes calmed.
God, just that, his name and a simple touch from me and he calmed.
Was he that attuned to me?
“Who burned you?” he whispered back.
Oh no.
I closed my eyes.
“Livvie.”
My throat clogged.
No one called me Livvie.