And he was right to.
“You crave in fantasy what you’re incapable of in reality,” she said, and the silence that followed told her all she needed to know. She was right. She was so right she didn’t dare look at him, and when she did the news was not good.
He looked grim as fuck. Like she’d just said you have three days to live.
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“But you did.”
“It was cruel to say.”
“Sure it was. Hurt like a motherfucker to hear it, I tell you what.”
“Then why did you want me to say it?” she asked, and hated the thin, high note to her own voice. She hated it, but couldn’t stop it coming. “Whydid you push me to say it?”
“So you could see how goddamn good you are at knowing why people do what they do. I have three buses circling my body and knives apparently can’t kill me. But you knocked it all aside like it was nothing and came up with that shit like this.”
He snapped his fingers—a good hard snap that should have convinced her.
But it didn’t. And nor did his completely sure and confident expression. She just looked away and said, “It would have been obvious to anyone who saw those books.”
“The guy I had in here last week assumed they belonged to a sister I don’t have.”
“But if you had told him—if you had said—”
“I said they were mine, and he asked if I read them for the sex.”
“Mostguys just think about the sex.”
“Though you knew I didn’t.”
She did stop, then. She had to—and not just because she’d run out of arguments. There was also the fact that he’d just done yet another incredibly kind thing for her, and here she was trying to throw it away.
“You let me say things that are painful to you just to prove I could do something.”
“I would do a lot of painful things for you, Lydia.”
“Why though? Why? Why?”
“Because nobody deserves it more.”
He shrugged one shoulder when he said it.
As if it was nothing. As if all of this was nothing.
He even added, after a second, “Go on. Go inside now.”
But he had to know that was impossible.
“I can’t. I have to…say something. Or do something.”
“Then do it. Do it now, while the forcefield is still fucked.”
“I think that will only make it more awful, to be honest.”
“Nothing you do could ever be awful.”
If he had said anything else, she knew she would have been able to resist doing it. Her insides were still in turmoil; her head was full of insane things she didn’t want to be thinking. It should have been easy to avoid, really.But then those words were there, and their eyes met, and he was so sincere—too sincere, really. Like a man so unused to feeling affection that it slips by him, before he can stop it.Like a woman who can’t believe what she’s feeling, until it’s already too late.
