I need more.
Crying my heart out, I take his face between my hands and pull his mouth to mine. Our lips crash together, tongues colliding. Safe, warm, alive.
Still here. Still mine.
I moan and weep and beg, taking everything I can before it’s gone.
Tears track down his cheeks, mingling with my own. We’re both wet, soaked with pain and need. My hands grab at anything tangible—his hair, cheeks, neck, shoulders, chest—then sweep down his body until I’m fumbling with his waistband.
He croaks out a sound, clamping a big palm around my wrist. “Annie, wait.”
“No, please, God, I need you,” I sob. “I need this.”
His forehead falls to mine, head angling back and forth as he locks up and pulls back. “Annalise.”
My voice cracks, and I stumble away from him. I shake my head, dragging my hands through my hair until I’m squeezing it by the roots.
Then I bolt from the shed.
“Annie,” he calls out.
I hear him following me, somewhere between my skipping pulse andthudding heart. When I glance back, I see him misjudge the doorway, his shoulder clipping the frame hard enough to make him stagger. He blinks, nearly losing his footing in the grass before he pushes on.
The sight guts me.
Rubble and prickly grass gouge my bare feet, and I slip and slide as I run for the door, part of me hoping the bear jumps out and devours me whole. Swallows all this pain in one gulp.
I tear into the house, hardly breathing, barely standing.
A moment later, Chase reaches for me, pulling me to him, his breath ragged like he’s sprinted through hell. “Please don’t run,” he says, one hand curled around my waist, the other braiding through my hair. “Please. We can’t both run.”
He holds me like he’s terrified I’ll slip through his fingers again.
But it’s he who’s slipping through mine.
“I’m sorry,” I whimper. “I’m sorry. I just thought—”
“You have no idea how much I want you.”
His breath shudders against my hair as I tip my face up to his, grief running wild down my cheeks. “Then let me in. Let me love you,” I plead. “While there’s still time.”
Eyes squeezed shut, he clenches his jaw so tight it looks like it hurts. “I’m scared,” he rasps. “I’m scared of me. Of how I touched you that night. How far gone I was. I was angry, and lost, and I didn’t care about anything as long as I still had you.”
“I wanted it,” I whisper. “Every second of it.”
He looks at me, and I see all of it: the fear, the guilt, the grief that’s been sitting behind every word he’s spoken since I came back. A quiet kind of torment.
I move closer, slow and deliberate. When I lean in, his hands twitch upward, almost like he might catch me, but they falter, dropping back to his thighs.
Still, I press my lips to his. Soft, patient. Begging him to believe me.
He exhales, forehead falling to mine, lips unmoving. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t.” My voice cracks, but my hand is steady when I cup his cheek. “That’s the difference, Chase. That’s why you’ll never be him. Because you care too much. Because the thought of hurting me rips you apart.”
His eyes close tight.
“You don’t need me to absolve you,” I finish, my thumbs brushing over his skin. “You need to forgive yourself.”
