Her frown deepened.
“It wasn’t about you.”
She rocked to a stop, whirling on him, and for a moment, he saw everything she was feeling on her face. Surprise and anger and pain. Severe, gut-wrenching disappointment.
Then it was gone. All the energy and feeling that had been propelling her down the street evaporated. She sank to the curb between two parked cars and wrapped her arms around her knees.
After a moment’s pause in which he couldn’t figure out what to say or do, she turned her face away, and he heard her sniffle. She lifted a hand to wipe her face.
Crying.
He’d made her cry.
God, he was an ass.
He wanted to put his arm around her, but if he’d even had that right, he’d forfeited it. “Don’t cry,” he said. He sat down beside her. “It’s all my fault.”
She made this noise—this horrible noise that sounded as though it had forced its way up from the bottom of her soul. Her back shuddered, and she began to sob—really sob, a wretched, violent sound that made him want to run anywhere, to do anything other than sit here and listen.
“Shh,” he said. Trying to be soothing, though he didn’t have a clue how anyone could pull it off. How anyone could stand this. He inched closer until his thigh touched hers, because even though he shouldn’t touch her, he couldn’t leave her alone, either. Not when she was so miserable. “Shh, May-Belle.”
His hand lifted of its own accord and began stroking up and down her back, but that seemed to make her sob harder, so he stopped. His hand came to rest on the back of her neck.
“Go ahead and cry, then,” he said, because shushing her wasn’t working, and he’d begun to understand that this wasn’t normal crying—this was something else.
Mourning. Purging.
This was a woman who’d put up a good front through two extraordinarily shitty days finally letting out all the emotions she’d been suppressing.
You asked for it, Hausman.
“Cry. I’ll wait. It’s not like I had anything better planned for tonight anyway.”
Wiping her eyes, she turned her head and gave him a wobbly smile through her tears. “You’re such a jerk.”
“I know.”
And then she turned the rest of the way toward him, and he opened his arms and widened his knees to fit her inside them so he could hold her.
He didn’t know if it was the right thing to do. Probably not. She felt too good in his arms.
But it was what she wanted, and after what he’d just done, he wasn’t about to deny her anything.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
May removed the tags from her new clothes. She peeled off inspection stickers and checked care labels.
Soap into the barrel, quarters into the slots. Cold water for the colors. Warm water for the whites. Delicates in to soak.
Regardless of whether she continued to stay with him—which was obviously, objectively, a bad idea—or whether she came to her senses and booked herself a hotel room, she would need clean clothes.
So. Laundry.
She dropped her purchases into the right tubs, where the water saturated the fabric and stole whatever magic they’d possessed.
She hoped it would come back. She’d liked those clothes.
Damn it, she’d liked Ben, too, and she fully expected warning flags to be flapping. Alarm bells to be ringing in her head. If May told her mother or Allie about his temper, the divorce he wouldn’t talk about, the kiss …
Run, May. Run fast.
Instead, she was doing his laundry, mingling their clothes together. She didn’t fear Ben. She feared her own disappointment. Her bad habits and where they led her.
When he’d kissed her, the kiss wasn’t what she had hoped it would be. What else was new? It was the story of her whole blasted life, this gap between what she hoped for and what she got.
It wasn’t the world’s fault. It was hers. She spun fantasies, but she had to live in reality. The habit was too old, too deeply ingrained to do anything about except notice it. Nod her head. Ah, yes. Screwing myself over once again.
That was what had happened with Dan. He’d always been himself—the self-indulgent boy-man she didn’t like quite enough on the morning of their first meeting—but she’d invented a thousand reasons not to notice, because he’d picked her. In exchange for doing her the great favor of wanting her around, she’d given him everything—her love, her attention, her faith.
There was an old schoolhouse in the countryside south of Green Bay, a mile or so past where the paved part of the Fox River Trail ended. She knew which room would be hers and Dan’s, which one for the baby, which one for the older child. She knew where the garden would go and what kind of dogs they would have.