“I can’t,” I start, the mask I’ve so carefully honed falling into place—the one that I never should have taken down. “I can’t do this with you. I thought I could, but I can’t.” My voice cracks on the last word, the only indication that I’m not made of stone as I do this.
As I end things.
As I break us.
His brow furrows, his glasses sliding down his nose the slightest bit. “But last night?—”
“Last night was a mistake.” The words are cold, and he flinches like I’ve struck him and I might as well have. “Being together…giving in to you…was a mistake.”
I stare and let the words sink in.
Being with you was a mistake.
I know the moment it happens. His lips part ever so slightly, a softly exhaledwowthe only sound I can hear as if he’d exclaimed it rather than whispered it.
Eyes dropping to the ground, he scuffs his boot over the earth and I think he’s going to say something—anything—but he doesn’t. Instead, he bends down to place the coffee cup on the frozen grass before standing. He won’t look at me and I don’t blame him. I did this to him.
To us.
I want to tell him I’m wrong, but I can’t for both of our sakes. He’d been a moment of weakness—a moment of the most beautiful reprieve. But he deserves so much more than what I could offer. I open my mouth to tell him that—to somehow lessen the blow—but all the air is sucked from my lungs as I watch him lift his hand to wipe a single tear from his cheek as he turns to leave.
My jaw clenches, my teeth grinding as I watch his shoulders hunch, his hand reaching up to his face again where I know without seeing him that more than just that lone tear has escaped.
I didn’t cry after losing Dante, and I know damn well he didn’t cry over me. Guy didn’t even lose sleep after using me and tossing me aside. I should have learned my lesson. I should haveheeded the little voice in my head telling me not to get involved with Reid in the first place.
But I’d so desperately craved his warmth. I sought out his kindness, hoping to have some of it for myself.
To havehim.
“Harlan, can you help me over here?” Lake’s voice sounds like he’s talking to me underwater, my head turning in slow motion to look at him. “Are you okay?”
No.
“Of course,” I say, shaking away the devastation of breaking Reid’s heart. It might have been bold to assume he’d fallen for me in any capacity in such a short time, but I knew deep in my soul that he had.
Because I’d fallen too.
17
REID
“Are you okay?” Wren asks as she breezes into my office with coffee in hand. Pausing at my desk, she places a cup next to the other one that’s undoubtedly cold right now, her look of concern transforming in an instant to downright murderous. “Do I need to kill him?”
She doesn’t need to specify becauseof course she doesn’t.Harlan had been an obsession and I’d been so blind.
I’d fallen for him, and last night I would have sworn he’d fallen for me too.
But he hadn’t.
Instead, he’d been cruel, his voice cracking only the slightest bit as he told me we’d been a mistake. ThatI’dbeen a mistake.
His words gutted me but there was something else—something that I couldn’t quite shake. Like he hadn’t wanted to say the words but felt like hehadto.
But why?
It was a question I might never know the answer to, and right now, I didn’t want to.
Still, he didn’t deserve death—maiming, maybe, but not death. But I appreciate her enthusiasm. “No, I’ll be fine.”
