“That’s just another word for actually feeling things. Actually being human,fuck. Is that what you’ve thought all this time? That I was justindulgingyou? Or trying to make you happy at the expense of myself? I was trying to make up for everything I did. To show you how I really feel—that it’s okay. That it’s not a bad thing to be passionate. To be the way you are. That I wish I was like that—god, what I wouldn’t give to be like that. Like you were all those years ago, like some great and glorious sun viewed from a prison cell in fuckinghell.”
He made a fist on the end of those words.
Raised, like someone trying to snatch a bullet from the air before it could hit his heart. Though somehow, she didn’t think it was his heart he was wanting it not to hit. It was hers. It was hers. Oh dear god, she knew it was hers.
She even knew where it wasfrom.
She had heard it before, it was from one of his books.
“That’s the dedication at the start ofNever Not You,” she said, voice so faint it felt like letting out a breath she hadn’t meant to. And as soon as it was out she wanted to gather it all back. Do everything over, not admit that she knew.
That way he could carry on pretending like he always had.
But didn’t want to anymore.
“Ofcourseit fucking is,” he snarled. Then softer, and softer yet, as the realization of what he was saying seemed to sink through him. Ten years, and here it was. “Of course it is. Of course.”
And now it was her turn to not be able to speak.
She just stared at him, down this endlessly beige hallway. One of a series of them, like all the rest, completely nothing, completely dull.We should be on a cliff face overlooking a crashing ocean while a storm rages, she thought.
Though the wrenching emotional understanding remained the same.
“Oh my god. Oh my god, it’s me,” she said, voice too heartbroken already.
Say no, she thought at him.Say no, say no.
But she already knew he had no way to.
“Who else could it have ever been.”
“But you said you made her up.”
“I lied. I’m a fucking liar. Just another one of my tons of terrible qualities.”
“You don’t have tons of terrible qualities, Caleb, stopsayingthings like that.”
Too desperate, too loud, too angry,she chided herself.
She couldn’t help it, though. Her heart was being sucked into a howling void.
“That’s what you’re going to be mad at? I just told you about the bullshit I’ve been spinning for the last ten years, and you’re fuming that I maybe think I’m a shittyperson? Wake up, Daisy, Iama shitty person,” he said, while she was still flailing around from the last evil he had just done himself.
She didn’t know how to keep up. She was making mistakes, and knew it.
“Just not telling me you lo—that youlikedme does not make you one.”
“Yeah, but that’s not all I did, is it. I also very much did not enjoy the way I felt about you. And guess what that made me do? Come on, you can work it out. You do it for a living—figuring out someone’s problem and smoothing it over. So tell me what my problem was, Daisy. What did I need to make my life easier?”
Donotgo with his framing, she ordered herself.
But dear god, it was hard when he was so fierce. He was bulldozing her now, and she knew it. Getting closer, chest heaving, fists clenched—the works. Full-on trying to force her to accept something, in a way he hadn’t for an age.
And she knew why, too.
The only thing that mattered more to him than her comfort was making himself the bad guy. “You tried to tell yourself that you were too awful for me, that it was a lost cause, that making yourself vulnerable with me would be a terrible mistake because of those facts,” she tried, and he laughed, he actually laughed.
“Oh no, no, no, don’t give me an out like that.”
