“Know what I definitely don’t have to figure out?” Knox says cupping her face with his palm. “How much I love you and your mom.”
She smiles, tears twinkling in her brown eyes. “Good. Because we love you too.”
I sniff. I don’t mean to. But fuck, this might just take me out.
Sloan looks up at me for a second, then looks back to the small gift shop just a few feet away. “I’m going to go see if they have any magazines I might like,” she says, in a strange but deliberate way.
“You don’t read magazines.”
“I may start.” She bugs her eyes out at me, then gestures for me to talk to Knox as she backs up to give us some privacy.
“Your ex is an idiot,” he grumbles under his breath, moving in closer to me. “I feel like a dad after three days with that kid, how can he have been with her from birth and not feel what I’m feeling?”
I swallow what feels like my heart having leapt to my mouth, sending it down to plummet to my gut where it hits like a brick. I suddenly don’t think I can do this.
But I can’t ask him to stay. Even if I thought he’d say ‘yes’, that some small part of him even wanted me to, I could never do that to him.
So, I have to do this.
He takes both my hands, one in each of his. “I’ll call you when I get there.”
I shake my head. “No, don’t.”
His brow crinkles and I know I’m going to hurt him again. It’s the last thing I want to do. “Why not?”
“I don’t want to drag this out,” I whisper, my voice failing me. “The next four days are our shot at seeing what is real and what was just fantasy. So, I think we should let those days be as normal as possible. Do your shows. Fall back into all your regular routines. No calls. No texts. No taking me along.” I pause. I need a moment to wrangle my own feelings back into submission. “If the bubble doesn’t pop, then you come back. We figure out how to move forward for real. If it does, we have a clean break. No dragging anything out. No hurting each other in slow motion. No tainting what we had the last few days by turning it into a burden we don’t know how to release each other from.”
“What if I come back and you’re the one whose bubble popped?”
I shake my head. “What we lived the last few dayswasmy real life. I’m going to go home and face the fact that there’s an empty space now where you fit perfectly. You’re going to go back to a life I’ve never had a place in to begin with. My bubble popped the night you followed me from the stage out into the parking lot. That’s where my fantasy ended, and my real life began.” I shrug, helpless to do anything else. “But that’s where your fantasy started.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
KNOX
“Maybe it’s time to quit. Call it a good run, and just get the fuck out,” Matti says yanking me out of my head and back to the present, where I’m seated beside him in the backseat of a town car. Apparently, someone on my team caught wind he was picking me up and arranged for a service, completely defeating the purpose of having a friend pick me up.
“I feel like I’ve said that recently,” I mumble, looking out the window at the cars and buildings passing by.
“I feel like maybe you should say it again. See how it feels now.” I can’t tell if Matti’s fucking with me or if he’s being serious.
I do know this. “I’m not quitting.”
“Then why do you look like this is the last place on earth you want to be?”
I sit up taller and peel my eyes away from the window. “It’ll pass.” According to Kenley, everything I’ve felt since the moment I met her will.
“I don’t get it.” He kicks at my boot, same as he used to do when we were kids, and he was trying to get a rise out of me. “Last time I talked to you, everything was all fairy dust and butterflies. What the fuck happened?”
“Fairy dust and butterflies? Where are you getting your analogies from?”
He laughs. “I was facetiming my nieces on the way to the airport to pick you up.”
If I recall, Milli and Bea are seven and five now. So, I guess that checks out. “Maybe it was all fairy dust and butterflies,” I admit, giving in to the comparison, ridiculous though it sounds in a conversation between two men in their forties. “Maybe itstill is. I don’t know. Kenley got all freaked out. And at first, I didn’t buy into it...but then.” The shit she said at the airport got in my head. “I’m never going to need her,” I say the thing that’s been weighing on me for hours. “She’s been scared all along that I would come back here, get on the bus and go on with my life like nothing happened. And the truth is, I could. I’ve always been able to. Because I don’t need anyone in that way. Not even her.”
Matti does a strange, slow clap. “Congratulations, man. You’re an adult. I got news for ya, you’re not supposed to need anyone.”
I frown. I know he gets what I’m saying, I don’t know why he’s acting like he doesn’t. “Obviously. I just mean -” But he cuts me off before I can finish.
