Love Triangle Six Books of Torn Desire - Willow Winters Page 0,518

like this …” her voice cracks, but she doesn’t cry. She simply looks away.

My heartbeat slows. So slow that it’s painful.

“Where are you sleeping tonight?” Kat asks me and I have to swallow the spiked lump deep down in my throat before I can answer.

“You don’t want me to come home?”

“It would be easier if you didn’t.”

“Easier for what?” I ask her.

“Easier for the breakup, Evan.” Her lips part and then she wavers to add, “It’s not about love anymore or about what we had. It’s about trust and what we’ve become. I need a fresh start and a life I’m proud of. And I don’t think it includes you in it.”

“It does,” I answer her instantly. “And I want the same.”

She stares back at me with an expression that shows how vulnerable she is. How much she wants to believe what I’m telling her.

I take her hand in mine and tell her, “I’ll do whatever you want, so long as when it’s all said and done I get to keep you.”

I stare in her eyes knowing I’ve never said anything more truthful, but also knowing that’s not how this story will end.

Chapter Seventeen

KAT

Makeup kisses taste so sweet,

Lost in lust and succumbed to the heat.

Your soft moan makes me forget,

I ignore the anger, the sadness, the threat.

The bed groans and dips as I turn back onto my right shoulder, pushing the pillow between my knees and trying to sleep.

I’ve been alone all my life. Until Evan, anyway. When he first started sleeping over, it was hard to fall asleep. Unless he fucked me to the point of exhaustion, which was often.

You’d think it’d be easy going back to being alone. I was a pro at it for years and worse yet, I was proud of it. The train goes by and the sound cuts through the white noise of the city. The windows are closed, but I still hear it. I can even feel the rumble and vibrations as I try to lie still on the bed. And that’s when I get a whiff of Evan’s scent. When I’m alone, missing him, I sleep on his side of the bed. It’s easiest the first night he’s gone. It smells just like him. Each day it gets a little harder and working late nights gets more appealing. But even the masculine scent that drifts toward me as I inch my head closer to his pillow isn’t enough to comfort me. And why would it? I’m losing him and everything we had.

I toss the heavy comforter off my body and sit up, wiping the sleep from my eyes and dangling my feet over the side of the bed. It’s nearly 1 a.m. and pitch black in the room. I should be sleeping, considering the fatigue plaguing my body and conscious it should come easy.

My fingers run through my long hair, separating it and braiding it loosely before I take a sip of water from the glass on the nightstand. If I get up and start working, I know I won’t sleep at all tonight. The very thought makes my heart thump harder. Work is killing me, lack of sleep is destroying me. But both are because I’m completely and utterly alone.

Just breathe. I let my head fall back and slowly creep back under the covers. All I need to do is breathe.

But that hope is short-lived as I hear Evan climb the stairs. I had one condition to him coming home, and that was leaving me the bedroom. Which he said he wasn’t going to do, and that offer went off the table.

Even if it hurts me, I’d rather feel pain in his absence than a fraction of that pain in his presence.

I close my eyes as I hear the door open. For a moment I think I should pretend to be asleep. But I don’t want any more lies in our relationship. Whatever our relationship even is now.

“I thought you were going to your dad’s? Or a hotel?” I ask him and then hold my breath. I should want him to leave. That’s what a sane woman who’s getting a divorce should want. But there isn’t an ounce of me that wants to see him walk out that door.

“I was going to,” Evan says and then slips his shirt off over his head. He keeps his eyes on me, daring me to say something, but my eyes focus on his broad chest.

In five years his body has changed, as has mine.