She lifts her eyes to mine. Tears sit there, unshed, and her jaw locks like she’s choosing pain on purpose.
“But I can’t take you back, Luke,” she says firmly. “We can’t get back together.”
Cold floods my chest.
“You don’t love me anymore?” I ask, barely breathing.
“No,” she whispers, staring at our hands like they’re the only thing she can control.
“You don’t mean that.” The words come out before I can stop them. “You don’t.”
Because she doesn’t lie well. I can see it in every fiber of her.
The irony of that thought guts me to the core. I can tell she’s lying because she’s not a good liar… and that should’ve been my first clue the night she begged me to listen.
“Look me in the eye and say the words,” I demand, my voice strained and my hands shaking. “Say, ‘I don’t love you, Luke.’”
Her tears finally fall, splashing onto our joined hands.
“Say it to my face, Andi.”
Her mouth opens. She tries. And then the truth breaks her.
“I can’t.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ANDI
Telling Luke I don’t love him is the hardest, ugliest thing I’ve forced myself to do since the night I landed in a psychiatric hospital. And I didn’t even say the words. Not really. I just saidnowhen he asked if I loved him.
But he knew. He heard the lie in the spaces between my breaths. Luke Woods may not always listen when it matters, but he can read me like scripture when he’s close enough.
That’s why he’s trying to make me say it to his face. If I can look him in the eye and destroy us with a sentence, he can accept it as truth.
I can’t.
No matter what’s happened, I can’t end us with those words. If this mess goes the way my instincts keep screaming it will, I can’t die with a lie like that on my tongue and Luke’s broken expression as my last memory.
I let go of his hands and push to my feet because when I cry, I can’t breathe sitting down. My nose clamps shut, my chest tightens, and everything inside me turns into panic. Standing forces my body to cooperate. Standing gives me air.
Luke rises with me immediately, like we’re tethered.
I almost laugh, and the sound surprises me because it’s not humor so much as disbelief. Part of me recognized it earlier. When he walked me to his truck, when he buckled me in like I was a seatbelt and not a human being, I had a feeling I was being kidnapped.
But he’s right about one thing. I know Luke would never physically hurt me.
I pace. Not because I’m trying to escape, but because my thoughts need motion or they’ll eat me alive. Luke shifts into position, broad shoulders squared, body angled between me and the door. Blocking it. Guarding it. As if I’m the threat.
He thinks he’s controlling the room.
I let him have that illusion. I have bigger problems than Luke’s protective ego. Like convincing a man who climbs into boxing rings for fun that he needs protecting fromme.
I stop pacing and face him, giving him the look I use at the youth center when the room needs to quiet down and listen. “You’re not going to like what I have to say.”
“And that’s different from just now…how?” he asks dryly, but there’s a soft edge to it. A thread of the humor he knows I love.
I feel my mouth twitch. “Luke, I can’t tell you I don’t love you. You already know that.”
