Let her go?
Those three words swirled through him.
Tormenting him.
Half a question, half a statement. Sometimes he knew it was what he had to do, other times, he wondered, and hoped. Maybe there was a way around this?
But then he remembered the look on her face, the way she’d stepped back from him as if she wasterrifiedof what loving him back might mean for her, and it had been an absolute death knell to his own hopes. All this time, he’d been scared of hurting her. He’d run from her for precisely that reason, yet he’d hurt her anyway.
And in a way that had shaped her into adulthood.
You’re the ex I couldn’t get over.
* * *
For days, he followed the same pattern, telling himself eventually, if he got back into his groove, it would all start to hurt less.
He ran ten miles in the mornings, went to the club gym and did sixty-minute weight sessions followed by another block of cardio. He watched that cooking show on Netflix everyone was raving about, with the guy who swore all the time. He went to bed early, hoping it would mean he’d get a good night’s sleep.
He prepped for pre-season training to begin. He told himself this was his life – the same life he’d had before the wedding – and eventually he’d feel like he belonged in it again.
But no matter how much he told himself that, he still felt the growing, aching, expansion of a black hole in his chest.
He still felt lost at sea. Adrift.
And his anchor was all the way back in Ashbury Falls, determined to never see him again.
There was no solution to that. No magic fix. He just had to accept it and learn to live with the pain.
* * *
Aiden ‘Man Mountain’ Carter hadn’t become a man mountain by accident. Even as a teenager, he’d pushed his limits constantly. His height he couldn’t really control, but the rest of it was sheer willpower and determination.
Nonetheless, as she stood in the back of the gym and watched him lift the bar of weights, so every muscle in his body pulsed and vibrated, his face taut from the effort, sweat running down his shirtless back in rivulets from the monumental all-body stamina it took to hold the thing at shoulder height, her mouth went dry, and her gut clenched up.
She’d known he worked hard but this was next level.
She couldn’t hear him grunting, or panting, because the music in the gym – some kind of thrasher metal – was up way too loud, but she could see the way his lips were parted, his fierce concentration as he stared at himself in the mirror and presumably counted or whatever it was he did to know that he’d pushed himself just the right amount.
Afraid of startling him and having him drop the thing on his feet, she stayed exactly where she was, where the security guard had let her into the gym, wincing a little at the barrage of heavy beats thrumming around them.
Though Sienna had hated bothering Astrid and Blake on their honeymoon, a quick text explaining the situation had resulted in Blake pulling strings – immediately – to get VIP access to the clubrooms and gym of the training grounds. Chuck had happily let her hitch a ride back on his private jet, and had spent a lot of the time going over the mechanics of flight in a way that finally seemed to unclog something she’d been holding onto for years. Or maybe it was just that for the first time ever, she was so excited about where she was going, and who she was going to see, that she almost forgot to feel terrified.
Even above the decibel-bending level of the music, she heard the metal hit the ground and saw the way his whole body seemed to tighten up in relief at no longer holding the thing. He stood still, staring at himself, frowning, sweating, for several seconds and then went to pick it back up again, so she knew that if she didn’t move now, she’d have to wait all over again.
And she didn’t want to wait any more.
She was completely done with waiting.
‘Aiden.’ Her voice barely made a dint in the song.
She had no choice but to walk over to him. To grab his attention, before he picked up the bar again.
The second she stepped out, his eyes flicked to hers in the mirror and his expression turned into something anguished. Something awful. Something that ripped her heart out of its cavity and made the whole world spin too fast.
Just like the way he turned to face her, as if his mind might have been playing tricks on him in the mirror, showing something that didn’t exist.
You’re in every nook and cranny of Ashbury Falls.
