He begins to walk toward me then.
Stride over to me.
And as always, I stay put. My legs won’t move.
I watch him, his thighs, rippling, shifting under his jeans, dripping with power. I watch them in all their majestic beauty and my heart twists.
It wrenches and pulses and cries out for him.
When he reaches me, he backs me up.
He crowds me with his body and makes me walk backward, his shoes clashing with my flats, until my spine bumps into something. A tree, rough and edgy.
Like him.
He dips his face toward me, his shoulders hiding the world from my eyes, and I crane my neck up, not wanting to see anything else in this moment anyway.
“What do you know?” he growls.
“Everything.”
His jaw is hard. “Tempest.”
“I made her,” I tell him hastily. “I forced her to tell me. I saw those files in your car last week. Jackson Builders. And so I called her and practically pried it out of her.”
He bends down even more.
Putting his hand on the tree by the side of my neck, he lowers himself over me, his chest still heaving. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? You pry and pry and stick your nose in things that are none of your business.”
My ballerina toes go up and I stretch myself as much as I can to bridge the gap between our heights. “But itismy business. Because you did it for me. To get me free.”
“I told you —”
“You did, didn’t you?” I cut him off because I’m not letting him deter me. “That game. That championship game, that was so important to you, that youneededto win. That was your last, wasn’t it? That was your last game.”
I’m watching his face. I’m watching all the angry, violent things pass through his features and yet I can tell that he’s digging his fingers into the bark.
I can tell that he’s almost clawing at it.
“That’s what you did,” I continue, my neck still tilted toward him. “That’s what you had to do to get me free. You had to give up soccer. You don’t live in New York either, do you? Because your dad asked you to come back. Because you work for him now, at his company. The place where you never wanted to end up at. But you did. Because of me. I stole your car and you had to give up soccer, something that you loved to —”
“I don’t love soccer.”
“What?”
“Fuck soccer.”
“W-what do you mean?”
“I mean,” he says, his teeth clenched, “I don’t care about soccer. I never did.”
I come down to earth then.
My toes can’t hold my weight and so I have to come down on my heels and press my spine against the tree even more. “But that’s… that’s not true. All those years of rivalry. All those fights with Ledger because you wanted to be the best. You wanted to win. You betrayed me for it. You love soccer. You —”
His harsh chuckle stops me.
Harsh and brutal and full of something that feels like hate.
