“Why do you think something’s going on?”
“She’s just really fixated on everyone who works at the hospital.” She shook her head. “It’s none of my business.”
“It is your business because she lives with you.”
“You don’t need to worry about me.”
“I willalwaysworry about you, Clara.”
Her focus shot back to him, eyes wide, emotions he couldn’t name flickering through them.
Another song started, this one slightly faster in tempo, but Clara didn’t stop or change the slow sway of her hips, and neither did he. He couldn’t. Because standing here, with Clara in his arms…it was the most at peace he’d felt for a while.
Throughout the dance, she softened against him, her body melding into his and her head almost touching his chest.
“Can I tell you something?” Her soft words cut through the quiet between them, catching him off guard.
“Anything.”
“Sometimes I get caught up in the memory of the moment the doctor told me I had stage four cancer.”
Something wrapped around his lungs at the mention of Clara having cancer…clenching, digging its nails into him. Every time he heard that word, he forgot how to breathe.
But he was careful to mask it. To watch the expressions play over her face. To wait, because damn, he wanted to hear what she had to say.
“It felt like my entire future disappeared in the span of a few seconds,” she continued. “Everything felt so infinitely unfair. I would have given anything to go back to before those words had left his mouth, to where my life didn’t feel like it was over.”
“But it wasn’t over.”
“No. It wasn’t. But I didn’t know that. I still remember him saying to me that if you’re going to get cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma is the ‘better’ kind of cancer. He said it like I was lucky, and his words just felt so absurd. Because no one’s lucky to get cancer.”
“Some people think they know what to say to make you feel better.”
“Nothingin that moment could have made me feel better. I had to feel it before I was ready to fight it.”
He tightened his arm around her. “You’re the strongest woman I’ve ever met. You know that, right?”
“Just woman?”
He chuckled. “Person.”
“That’s better.” She smiled up at him, but he couldn’t even lift the corners of his lips. Because, fuck, she was beautiful. The kind of beauty that made the world quiet. The kind of beauty that was impossible to look away from.
Her smile shifted into a frown. “When you look at me like that, I can almost convince myself that you…” She stopped, and even though she didn’t finish her sentence, he knew exactly what would have come next. Because she saw everything he tried to hide.
He stepped back, forcing his hands to drop. And the look on Clara’s face, the disappointment…it gutted him.
“Thank you for the dance, Clara.”
“Anytime.” The single word was quiet, almost a whisper, and laced with hurt.
Yeah, he was an asshole. An asshole she was better off without.
CHAPTER 9
Clara’s heart beat fast as she walked off the dance floor, every step away from him heavy and wrong. How she could feel hot and needy but also hurt and frustrated all at the same time, she had no idea. But she did. She felt all of it.
He didn’t want to be anything more than friends, but then he danced with her, held her, like she was all that existed in the world. He looked at her like…God, she couldn’t even explain how. Like hewantedher. Really wanted her, and not in a friendship or sisterly way.
