“No. It didn’t.” I smile wistfully, and take a long drink of water. “She finally gave me an ultimatum. Her or the company. Choose.”
“You chose the company.”
“I chose the only thing I knew how to build.” The admission tastes bitter. “Told myself she was being unreasonable. That she didn’t understand what it took to run a global operation. That she was asking me to choose failure.”
“But really you were just scared,” Sorrel says quietly.
I meet her eyes. “Yeah. Terrified. Because building an empire? That I know how to do. Loving someone? Being vulnerable? Letting them see the parts of me that aren’t polished boardroom performance?” I laugh without humor. “That’s a minefield I never learned to navigate.”
We sit in silence for a moment, both of us staring at our half eaten steaks.
“Maybe we’re both paying for the same mistake,” she says finally. “Marrying ourselves to work.”
I look up at her and her hand moves across the table. She touches mine. Not accidental. Not a brush in passing.
A choice.
The contact burns. Her fingers on mine. The first time she’s touched me on purpose since I carried her to bed when she was feverish.
I want to turn my hand over. Lace our fingers together. Pull her across this stupid island and into my lap. And kiss the shit out of her.
Instead I just sit there like an idiot, feeling the warmth of her skin against mine and trying to remember how to breathe.
“I should work out,” I say abruptly, pulling back.
She nods, the disappointment obvious in her eyes.
Fuck fuck fuck.
I retreat to the gym again like I’m fleeing an extraction site before collapse. Which maybe I am.
Every hour with her feels like the ground is shifting under my feet. Every conversation mining deeper into territory I’ve spent years keeping buried.
I punish myself with free weights for hours. Bicep curls until my arms shake. Bench press until my chest burns. Anything to work off this mounting tension that’s been building since I first saw her on my doorstep. The only heat in the room is coming from my body, but I’m working so hard I might as well be an oven.
When I finally drag myself back upstairs for dinner, she’s already cooking. The same efficient competence she brings to everything. The last two steaks are sizzling in the pan.
“Smells good,” I manage. I’m so hungry I could eat them both.
She smiles, saying nothing.
We eat mostly in silence. I’m too wound up to make conversation and she seems content to let me brood. When we’re done she cleans up while I go back to the great room and stare into the fire, trying to get my head on straight.
It doesn’t work.
By the time she joins me in the great room, settling onto her side of the sectional with one of her ecology texts, I’ve given up pretending I’m not completely fucked.
I watch her read. Watch her make notes in the margins. Watch her tuck that same strand of hair behind her ear over and over again, like if she does it enough times it might actually stay.
The fire crackles between us.
“What if the storm never breaks?” she asks suddenly, looking up from her book.
The question catches me off guard.
“It will,” I say automatically.
But then something in me snaps.
