Then he’d thanked her in that deep, sexy voice of his—and she’d tripped over the floor. Yep, the floor. There’d been nothing in front of her, she’d just tripped and barely caught herself.
If there was a definition for embarrassing, it was that.
As people started to file out, the nerves crawled up her throat.
He was going to talk to her. Of course he was. Only this time, she couldn’t run away.
Jace said something to Lock before turning toward the door.
Oh God, once his brother was gone, it would just be the two of them…again.
“Thanks for the class, Callie,” Jace called before stepping outside.
The silence that followed felt thick and heavy, weaving itself inside her veins.
Without looking up, she cleared her throat and said, “You need to leave too.”
“You can’t even look at me now?”
No. She couldn’t. Because then she risked forgetting their past and throwing herself into his arms.
Pathetic. She was pathetic.
Slowly, she forced her gaze up, way up, into his ridiculously beautiful eyes. It felt strange thinking of a guy like Lock, someone so big and strong, as beautiful, but he was. He always had been.
“I’m not ready to talk about it.” The words came out fast but quiet.
His brows twitched. “Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t matter.” The lie fell off her tongue. And it was a big lie. Their past and the reason things had worked out the way they did mattered. It had always mattered.
“You don’t want to know why I ended our relationship that day?”
“You loved me one day and broke my heart the next. The reason behind it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t send us back in time or undo what you did. It doesn’t give you back to me when I needed you most.”
The familiar panic curled in her belly at the memory of the night she so desperately needed him, but he wasn’t there.
She breathed through it, only looking back at Lock after a stretch of silence.
Crap. He was looking at her like she was a puzzle to solve.
“When was that?”
She swallowed. “What?”
“When did you need me most?”
She shook her head. “Lock, you can’t come in here demanding things from me. I thought we were forever. Youtreated melike we were forever. But then you did what you did and I had to come to the painful conclusion that you were never someone I got to keep. You were a memory. A lesson. But never my ending.”
Anger darkened his features. And maybe something else. Frustration? “That’s bullshit and you know it.”
She grabbed a random pile of papers from the desk and rounded it, moving toward the back room, needing to be somewhere else. “You really need to leave.”
“No. Not until we talk about this.”
Goddammit, he was stubborn. She dropped the papers onto the table.
“Did something happen after that day? Is that why you left town?”
