“Three days too many. I didn’t want to leave in the first place.”
I didn’t want to leave her in that bed, naked and satiated, looking like an absolute dream. I didn’t want to give up our one night together. But what got me out the door was the hope thatwe could pick it back up—that we could turn it into something that would last longer.
“That’s sweet,” she says, but she doesn’t return the sentiment. When she glances away for a brief moment, I’m hit with the feeling this isn’t about to go the way I wanted.
“Can we talk?” I ask quickly, before she tries to escape. “About us?”
She’s quiet as she holds my gaze, unblinking, a war happening behind her eyes that I can just barely see. And then she says, “I don’t think there’s anything to talk about.”
I don’t let her go, but my grip loosens. How can she say we don’t have anything to talk about when we have a million things we need to settle?
“Come on.” I scoff, trying to read her face for any sign that she’s messing with me. But I see nothing. “We can’t leave things like we did. We didn’t—”We didn’t get closure. We didn’t say where we’re going from here. We didn’t give ourselves a chance to explore all the things that should come next.“We didn’t even have a conversation.”
“We didn’t need to,” she says gently, but it feels more like she’s stomping me into the ground. “We’d already set the parameters of what was going to happen. Talking would have complicated things.”
And not talking will make iteasy? Can’t she see that doesn’t make any sense?
“We had our one night, Thomas.” The pat she gives my chest is meant to soothe. To show me there are no hard feelings. Instead, it’s like driving a chisel into the crack that’s formed in my heart, splitting it down the center. “Let’s leave it there.”
“Fine.” I don’t mean to say that. I don’t want to. I want to demand she hear me out. “I understand.”
I get a tight smile in reply, the distance in her eyes growing. She’s so far away that even when she leans in to kiss my cheek, I don’t feel it.
“I’ve got to get going,” she announces when she straightens. My hands fall away from her when she steps back and I wonder if that’s the last time I’ll touch her in private. “We’re closing on the new Stella Margaux’s location today. I can’twaitfor this store to be open.”
She’s acting like everything is perfectly normal, as if she hasn’t stripped my world of the color and sound and light she’s brought into it. I want to be happy for her, to be the supportive partner she deserves, but I can’t bring myself to do more than stare and nod.
“See you later, yeah?” she says over her shoulder as she heads for the door.
She’s gone before I can answer. But truth be told, I don’t think she was ever here. The Stella I know isn’t the one I just spoke to. This one was unfamiliar—the stranger I woke up next to in Vegas months ago. This isn’t the woman who said she was mine.
And she’s made it clear she never will be.
Chapter 30
Stella
Breaking your own heart is a hell of a drug.
I’ve been pushing, pushing, pushing for the past month to stop myself from thinking about the reopened hole in my chest. The wound is worse this time, aching and oozing, threatening to poison me. But as long as I keep going, as long as the adrenaline never wears off, I’ll survive it.
Throwing myself into work was the easy thing to do. With the new store set to open by spring, the never-ending to-do list has kept me busy and given me a reason to avoid Thomas. I knew I was going to have to do it the second he kissed me goodbye in the Maldives and said we’d talk when we got home. If I didn’t, it was going to be game over for me—I was going to fall in love with him.
I was going to lose myself again.
I’ve escaped that fate by a hair. Then again, maybe I haven’t, if this hollowness in my stomach is anything to go by. I felt this way when Étienne left, but not so acutely. I’m blaming the fact that I never fully healed from the first go-round, and thissecond fracture on top of everything has compounded it all. It’s no wonder every part of me feels wrong.
Dancing around Thomas has been torture, but it’s the only way to survive this. Gone are our easy connection and budding friendship. In their place are stilted conversation and overpoliteness. We feel more like strangers now than we did the night we met.
Maybe if he hadn’t left to see Lorenzo, if I’d told him to let the boy wait on us, things would be different. But I knew he had to go. That conversation was more important than anything he and I could have said to each other. And I knew we couldn’t renege on the deal we made to go back to following the rules, or else I never would have been able to pull myself back out of the warmth of being with him.
So I watched him walk away and let everything come crashing down.
Now we’re less than two weeks out from a wedding I’m not sure I want to have and I can barely look my husband in the eye. That won’t be good when we’re standing in front of the hundreds of people Thomas’s mother invited, including my entire family, who already think I got married for the wrong reason. Who’s going to believe we’re madly in love when we haven’t said much more thanheyandsee you laterin weeks?
It’s going to be a disaster. I’ve started dodging Janelle’s and Mika’s calls just to avoid having to talk about the wedding and my feelings about it, let alone my feelings for Thomas. I don’t want to dig into it and face the possibility that I completely fucked up by putting distance between us. But what else was I supposed to do? Stick around and fall into the messiest situation possible? Let my heart guide me instead of my head?
Absolutely not. I did that once and it got me left at the altar. I’m not risking it again.
