She was begging him to believe in her, but he just shoved his hands in his pockets.
“Is it?” He pressed his lips together before speaking again. “What if I told you I want to take a step back, cancel the grand opening. Just focus on wedding cakes. Stay small. Rent a portion of my kitchen to another baker to share expenses.”
“You wouldn’t,” she breathed, drifting close enough that his good vanilla-and-Erik smell went straight to her head.
“If I did, would I lose you?”
“As a client? Yes,” she said immediately. “I can’t let you waste all that potential.”
His face hardened. “I’m not your client.”
She opened her mouth to assure him that of course not, he was her boyfriend and she wasn’t going away. But something about what she’d just said scratched at her memories.
Potential. Wasted.
Her mother had said that to her at their horrible lunch, had accused Josie of wasting her potential. She pressed a trembling hand to her mouth as she revisited everything that had happened over the past twenty minutes. She’d pushed Erik to be something he wasn’t so she could claim the glory. She’d done to him what Pamela had spent a lifetime doing to her. Commodifying him. Using him to boost her own image.
Cold horror trickled down her spine, and she glanced over to find that he’d pulled the elastic from his hair and let it fall forward to hide his features. She was pushing him away. She was losing him.
“You need all this”—he waved a hand in the direction of the studio but didn’t turn toward her—“to feel good about yourself, but I don’t want it.” His whole body sagged against the wall, like this fight was leeching his essence, the thing that made him so big and vital and precious to her.
“So I guess that means you don’t wantme.” Her voice was tiny and scared.Shewas tiny and scared.
He looked at her with no trace of warmth on his face, and ribbons of pain unfurled in her heart. Every cell in her body cried out for him to deny it, to tell her that of course he wanted her, needed her,choseher. But his gaze dropped to the floor, and his shoulders lifted on a massive inhale.
“I never asked for any of this.” He lifted his head, but he fixed his eyes on a point beyond her shoulder. “I never wanted to want you.”
She gasped. She actually gasped as those baldly stated words stung her skin and sank into her blood and her marrow. This man had convinced her it was safe to pack away her defensive armor, and now she had nothing to protect herself from the fatal blow he’d just landed.
“Then I guess we’re done here,” she managed to say. “I-I hope you get whatever it is that you do want.”
But he’d already retreated into his own world, the one he’d been in the night they met, and his expressionless face hurt her almost as much as his cutting words had. She choked back a sob and spun on her heel to leave the building before she dissolved entirely.
Unfortunately, the moisture started to leak from her eyes once she reached the end of the hallway, and there was goddamn Dora, lurking around the corner, clearly having caught enough of their argument just now to account for that smirk on her face.
“Well. I guess we’ll see how well he does without someone there to pull his puppet strings.”
Josie blotted the tears with her wrist, gratified that she had the strength to fight at least this unworthy opponent.
“Please. He doesn’t need me to crush you in the baking department, you hateful cow.”
And with that, she sniffed back her tears, straightened her spine, and got the hell out of there to mourn the implosion of her relationship in private.
Thirty-One
“Hey. Hey!”
Erik’s head snapped down at the sharp words to find Gina draped in paper banners and peering at him in concern.
“Sorry,” he muttered, pressing pause on yet another replay of his fight with Josie three days earlier. He grabbed one of the strings of brightly colored pennants and stretched it along the top of the plate glass window in the dining area, wrapping it around a nail to hold it in place.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Gina handed him another strand.
He wasn’t, and they both knew it. Instead of answering her question, he said, “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Of course.” She plopped into a café chair to pick apart the tangle of the remaining banners, draping them over the shoulder of her denim overalls as she separated each one. “When you called me last night, you sounded so…”
Lost.She didn’t say the word out loud, but it’s how Erik would finish that sentence. He was lost in a churning, seething ocean, and he didn’t know how to stay afloat.
