Her eyes search my face, but I keep mine purposely unfocused. If I look at her now, I’ll lose myself entirely.
She closes her eyes.
I want to say, I heard you. I didn’t mean to, but I heard you through the door, and I want you to tell me who you were talking to. But even in my head, the words sound too overbearing, even for me.
“You’re gorgeous,” I say.
“You’re gorgeous,” she murmurs, keeping her eyes closed, but I feel her back arch a little bit like she’s replaying me fucking her not long ago. Her lips turn down into a little frown, and my mouth goes dry. I want to know what’s happening in her mind so badly that it hurts.
Her eyelids flutter, and I look away from her face. When I look back down, they’re closed again.
“Is something on your mind?”
Her tone is so soft it’s almost pleading. It’s the most gentle invitation possible for me to talk to her.
All the things I could say rush through my mind in a cacophony of words, senseless and jumbled. You need to tell me what you’re up to. Tell me what’s on your mind. Don’t hide things from me because I don’t think I can take it again. Not one more time in this life or any other. Just tell me, tell me, tell me.
Instead, I say, “Yes.”
Then there’s a thickness in my throat that I can’t seem to swallow away. Elisa swims up in my memory, the way her face looked before she died, and my mind rears back away from it.
I can’t say anything.
I can’t break the silence, which grows heavier by the moment. Carolyn’s face remains completely neutral—I haven’t stopped running my fingers through her hair, and at this point I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to—and her muscles are relaxed against me with a hint of tension humming underneath.
She parts her lips, and I want to lean down and kiss her, but I don’t.
“We don’t have to talk about it.”
My heart twists. Her voice is so sincere, so soothing, that for once I don’t feel like I’m being baited into revealing something in spite of myself. Her shoulders tense a little bit, waiting for my reply.
I can’t leave her hanging indefinitely.
“I don’t know if I can find the right words.”
This is as much of the truth as I can bear to give her. If I tell her everything in a rush right now, there’s no telling what might happen, and there’s a tiny part of me that questions whether she can be trusted, after all that happened today.
I want so much for it to be a meaningless phone conversation to a friend that I can’t ask the question.
I can’t.
But there’s another truth that I can tell her. This one might possibly open some door between us that will rid us of these silences.
Carolyn’s air conditioning unit kicks on, humming quietly in the background, while I struggle to settle on the best approach. Do I just blurt it out?
Jesus, I’m going to look like a fucking idiot, no matter what I say. If it’s not perfect, after spending this long thinking about it, she’s going to think I’m a total dumbass. I have to say something, and even though Carolyn is giving me no indication that she’s in any kind of rush, I feel the moments ticking away with the beating of my heart.
Say something. Say something. Say something.
I suck in a deep breath, hoping that by the time my lungs are filled with air, I’ll be certain of the ideal thing to say to this lovely woman with her head in my lap, the woman I want to spend every waking minute with, the one I’m desperate to be sure of before I let myself go completely.
But I’m already gone. That’s the catch. I’ve already fallen so hard for her, for her kindness, for the way she wants me, that it’s too late.
She must be dying for me to say something, after that little preamble. Who wouldn’t be? But she doesn’t move, just lets me keep stroking her hair. There is not even the slightest hint of a knot now. I’ve been thorough.
“The thing is,” I say, and then I have to stop to clear my throat. “The thing is, I don’t want to spend another day without you.”
The unsaid “but” hangs in the air between us, and Carolyn opens her eyes.
She bites her lip and looks away.
Instead of joy, her face shows nothing but guilt.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Carolyn
Jesus Christ, I am the worst human on the face of the earth.
Ace’s face is red—he basically just admitted to me that he loves me, or at least cares about me enough to want to spend every waking moment with me, and I—
I do nothing.
I sit up from his lap and look down at my hands, trying to force a smile onto my face.
This is exactly what I wanted. He is exactly the kind of man I want to be with—strong, passionate, complex. At this point, now that we’ve gotten past the asshole exterior, I can see clearly that he only has one flaw…and that flaw might turn out to be nothing.