“Don’t you think that’s best?” she asked, wishing she could flip on the light and not get a raging headache from the bright.
He traced the vein back down. “No.”
She moved her other hand to hold his still. “What if the longer we hang on, the harder it’s going to be when the day it ends comes?”
“What if the day doesn’t come?” he asked.
With their schedules? The way their lives were going? There was no way they could keep it up. The day would come. “You said yourself it’s only a matter of time.”
He didn’t release her hand, but it still seemed as though he were slipping away. “So you want to be done?”
No. That’s not what she wanted at all.
He reached to her neck with his thumb, seeming to trace her profile. Etching it in his memory or something like that.
She nudged him, just a little. “It doesn’t have to be dramatic and it doesn’t have to be today. We both knew this was coming.”
He stood. Paced to the oxygen tank on the wall, studied it. Then paced back. “And then things changed. You opened up to me and I sure as fuck opened up to you.”
That was a mutual mistake. “We didn’t follow our own rules.”
Now they had to pay the price.
“Right.” He stopped. “Tell me you want me to leave, and I’ll go. Tell me you want a divorce and I’ll sign the papers.”
“What I want has nothing to do with this.” It didn’t. If she got everything she wanted she’d already have five Academy Awards and an Emmy for best actress in a sitcom.
“It has everything to do with it,” he said. “You still get your career. I’ll make the changes so we can be together.”
“You’d give up the band?” she asked, totally appalled that this was even a conversation.
“If that’s what it takes.” He nodded.
No, that wasn’t going to happen. She wouldn’t let him do that.
“Your parents twisted you in knots, and you had to allow it because you loved them. Irefuseto be another person in your life who forces you to rearrange your own happiness because you love me. You love your job, your band…that’s whoKnoxis.”
He shook his head. Something in him changed as she spoke. Hardened. “Then you really don’t know me at all.”
“Knox…”
“Do you love me?” he asked. “I fell in love with you, but did you do the same?”
She opened her mouth, but words wouldn’t come. If she told him she’d fallen in love with him, too, it would only make everything harder.
“I’m gonna take a breather,” he said.
“We can always stay friends, Knox,” she said. “No matter what happens. We have that.”
He waited a long moment at the door, his back to her, but he didn’t turn around. Not even when the door closed. No, he didn’t look back.
And she didn’t have any idea what she was supposed to do with any of it.
Chapter Twenty-Six
IRINA
“You never wantto talk about it,” Courtney said, keeping an eye on Harley as she motored around the floor of Irina’s Los Angeles apartment.
