All his earlier certainty crumbled, leaving him off-balance and feeling like he’d walked out onto a thin beam over a deep gorge and the wood had started to crack. “Sabrina, what’s happening right now? If you’re scared, it’s fine. We can work this out tog—”
“Stop.” The word came out sharp. “Do not say, ‘together.’ I’m starting to think that word means something different to you than it does to me.”
He forced himself to breathe, to stay still when everything in him screamed to go to her. To fix this. To reframe the words that had shattered their perfect moment so that she understood that he was offering herparadise, not a cage.
She paced to the window, then back, that restless energy he loved about her now burning with something that looked a lot like panic. “I can’t move in with you. Just like that. As if everything is fine and we’re not still at very different places emotionally.”
“Okay.” He kept his voice calm even as his pulse tried to break a world record. “We can slow down. Table this discussion for later.”
“No. No discussion, Noah.” Her voice hitched. “You want to have fun, let’s have some fun, but moving in together is something else, something I didnotsign up for.”
“How is living together all of a sudden the opposite of fun?” He couldn’t help asking, even though her expression said he really didn’t want to know the answer. “I’m pretty sure I’ll still want to have fun while we’re cooking together or watching a movie together.”
She just shook her head, that wild look still in her eyes. Like she was searching for an escape route but couldn’t quite find one.
The sight pierced him somewhere vital. Because he’d put that look there. She wanted to escape fromhim.
“You’re missing the point. On purpose, I suspect,” she said, arms crossed. “Why do we have to change anything? What’s wrong with living our totally separate lives and seeing each other when we feel like it? Why do we have to put labels on things and drag feelings into this—”
“Because I love you, Sabrina,” he said and spread his hands wide to show her that he was offering himself to her, no holds barred.
“You might think you do, but you don’t,” she snapped, her voice rising with each word. “Love isn’t pushing your agenda down my throat when I already told you I’m not cut out for this.”
The accusation whacked him in the solar plexus, sucking everything out of him as if he’d fallen onto concrete. She didn’t believe him. She wasquestioningthe authenticity of his feelings. “That’s not true. At all.”
“It is true. You don’t want me, Noah. You want the experience of being in love. Of having this epic romance. I’m just convenient because I happen to be here. Any woman would have done the trick.”
“You think that in my head women areinterchangeable? How can you say that?” His stomach hurt. Everything hurt.
“Because it’s true.” She wrapped her arms around herself, backing toward the door. “You’re so caught up in the idea of finding this great love story that you don’t even see that I can’t give you what you want.”
“I see you, Sabrina,” he said around the eight ball in his throat. “I see how fierce you are, how dedicated. How you push yourself to be the best at everything. I see your strength and your vulnerability. And I love all of it. All of you.”
“Noah, please.” She shut her eyes for a beat, but he could still see the anguish carved into her expression. “Accept that I can’t do this. I can’t be your perfect romance novel ending.”
“That’s not what I’m asking for.”
“Isn’t it?” Her laugh held no humor. “You’re already planning our happily ever after, and I’m still trying to figure out how to be around you knowing that you have all these feelings I don’t have.”
The words landed like shrapnel, embedding themselves in places he couldn’t reach. Jacob’s warnings echoed in his head:You have a tendency to make a fool of yourself over a woman.
Had he really been so blind? So caught up in his own feelings that he’d missed how much he was overwhelming her?
“Sabrina.” He tried one more time, even as she reached for the door. “Please. We can slow down. Just don’t leave.”
“We tried that once. It didn’t work. Now I have to take the space I need.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I can’t think when you’re looking at me like that. Like I’m breaking your heart.”
“Aren’t you?”
But she was already gone, the door clicking shut behind her with devastating finality. Noah sank onto the couch, his legs watery and unreliable.
Was she right? Maybe he had been more in love with the idea of them than with the reality. Maybe he’d built this whole thing up in his head while she’d been trying to tell him all along that she wasn’t there yet.
Maybe she never would be.
The silence of his empty house pressed in around him, broken only by Dancer’s concerned whine. Noah buried his face in his hands, trying to breathe through the ache in his chest.
He’d thought they were writing their story together. Turns out, he might have been the only one holding the pen.
