She’s scared and she’s just trying to hurt me. But that’s the most horrible part, because it’s working.
“This.” I gesture between us. “I am not a mistake, Corrine.”
My voice breaks. Right now, we feel like one.
“We’re real,” I say but I can’t even convince myself.
Her voice is ice. I don’t need to hear her next words for my chest to crack the rest of the way open, for my heart, my lungs, to fall on the floor at her feet.
But she says them anyway.
“No. We’re over.”
I step back, like distance will somehow make this hurt a little less.
“Corrine,” I croak. My throat hurts. “Can we...talk about this? Maybe once we’re not so...”
“There’s nothing to discuss.”
She stands tall, her shoulders back, her face remote. Confident, intelligent, severe. She is every bit the woman I fell in love with. And I hate her for it.
Chapter 41: Corrine
Richard doesn’t acknowledge me when I walk in, shutting the door quietly. I wait to feel something. My eyes are dry, though my face is tight, as if I was at some point crying. I don’t remember it.
“Where’s Wesley?” Richard asks.
I open my mouth but no sound comes out at first. My whole body is wrung dry, a desert. “I told him to go home.”
Anger, like lightning, flashes across his face. “You had no right to do that.”
“I guess I’ve been doing things I haven’t the right to do a lot lately.”
He studies me, silent and fuming. “Sit down.”
The clack of my heels is jarringly loud against the hardwood. He had it installed last year, tearing out the ugly carpet. My body feels disjointed, my limbs put together wrong. I’m sweating. My heart beats faster with each step closer I take. By the time I sit down across from Richard my hands shake and all those feelings I wondered at are here, burning against my eyelids.
I wasn’t lying, when I told Wesley that I don’t do these kinds of things. I don’t take these risks. And yet, the only thing I want right now is to feel his presence beside me. Hear his awkward, nervous laugh. Feel his hand at my back, on my thigh, steadying me.
But I broke his heart instead.
I needed him to be away from here, to not incriminate himself any more than he already has. If that’s even possible. This can’t be what loving someone is; protecting them from the things you don’t want them to see. It can’t be. This hurts too much to be love. And yet, walking away feels like integral pieces of myself are suddenly missing.
Was protecting him—after everything he’s done to protect me—the real mistake?
Richard walks around the desk, bypassing the chair beside me, and sits on his desk, directly in front of me. He’s so close the shins of his pant legs brush against my knees.
Faintly and from a distance, alarm bells ring. But I think they’re only in my head.
“Well, Corrine. What are we going to do about this?”
I am eye level with his crotch. I focus past his hip instead, to a photograph of him shaking hands with some B-list actor whose name I can’t remember.
“I hate it when you don’t pay attention tome,” he hisses, grabbing my chin between his thumb and forefinger, jerking my head back to him.
I sit back in my chair, pulling myself out of his grasp. He’s never laid a hand on me—never an aggressive one, at least. My heart ratchets up in my chest.
But then, I’ve never seen him like this before. He’s unhinged, sweating. His eyes are bloodshot, anger etched into every line of his skin.
