Then his mouth flattened, and the hand on my thigh retreated, fisting in the quilt instead.
“Better?” he asked, the word rumbling through his chest into mine.
“Not really, no,” I squeaked, unable to find the words to explain how every point of contact felt like touching a live wire, electricity arcing between us with nowhere to ground itself.
“Your fingers are digging into my bad shoulder,” Teddy grunted, but made no move to shift them.
I immediately loosened my grip, embarrassed by how desperately I’d been clinging to him. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.” His hand came up to cradle the back of my head, fingers threading through my tangled hair. “Just try to relax.”
Relax. Right. Like I could do that with the ridges of muscle pressing into me with every expansion of his chest, his thumb tracing absent circles at the nape of my neck, the same way he used to when I couldn’t sleep.
“What are you thinking?”
I almost laughed. What was I thinking? That I’d spent two years trying to convince myself I was over him, only to fall apart the second he touched me. That my body remembered his like a language I’d once been fluent in. That the careful walls I’d built were felt about as solid as tissue paper.
I settled on, “I’m thinking this is a really bad idea.”
“Probably.” But his arms tightened around me anyway, like he couldn’t help himself. “But when’s that ever stopped us?”
Never.
We’d been terrible at stopping when things were a bad idea. Like when I was sixteen, and I snuck him into my bedroom window, convinced my parents wouldn’t hear us. Or when we decided to try for a third baby despite the multitude of complications with my previous pregnancies. Or when we kept pretending everything was fine long after our foundation had cracked beyond repair.
“Earlier, you said you thought you lost me, but you’ve—” My throat gave a painful squeeze, and I took a deep breath before forcing the words out. “You’ve always had me. Since the night you showed up at the homecoming dance, even though you hated them. You’ve had every piece of me since I was fifteen, Teddy. And I haven’t moved on—I can’t. I gave it all to you.”
His chest rose sharply beneath mine, the fire casting enough light for me to see the glossy shine of emotion in his eyes.
“Kels,” he murmured.
“I need to tell you something?—”
“Whatever it is, it can wait,” he said softly.
I’d been carrying this awful truth around since Levi’s death, and now that I’d finally worked up the courage to say it—to tell him that the divorce wasn’t his fault, that it was my shame eating me alive—he was shutting me down.
“Please. I need you to know?—”
“It can wait until morning.” His voice was gentle but final. “When you’re warm and thinking straight again.”
“I am thinking straight.”
Lie.
His hazel eyes searched my face, seeing through me the way he always had. “Are you? Because less than a day ago, you slammed a door in my face. Now you’re telling me I’ve always had you. Which version am I supposed to believe?”
He was right—I was all over the place, my emotions swinging like a pendulum between anger and longing, between the urge to run and the desperate need to stay exactly where I was.
“Get some rest.”
My chin wobbled, the ache behind my eyes building with the tears I was holding back. His rejection—gentle as it was—still cut deep. Here I was, offering him my heart again, and he was telling me to sleep it off like a bad hangover.
“Right,” I managed, already regretting the confession.
Our daughters had orchestrated this entire scheme because they still believed in fairy tales—believed two broken parents could be forced back together with nothing more than good intentions and a little Christmas magic.
But real life was never that simple.
