She leaned back but couldn’t seem to open any distance between them. He dominated her vision, every feature sharpened to fierceness by the firelight.
“Nick,” she warned. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“Yeah, I get that.” His eyes flashed. “I know I’m no one to you, anymore. Just some jerk you used to date who now makes steel and likes to fight.”
The words pricked at her, each one a bloodying jab. “What? God, no. You’re not a jerk. You’re...”
She clamped her lips together. She couldn’t admit the truth—that ever since leaving Indiana, she’d compared every man to him and found them lacking. That even after all these years, she still considered Nick Thacker the blueprint for the ideal human, minus one very specific flaw she could never forgive: he’d let her go.
When it became clear she had no plans to continue, Nick squared his shoulders. “The point is, I might not save people with math, but I still have some sense of justice. And nobody should be allowed to get away with what this guy has.”
“Maybe not, but it’s not your job to defend me. Not anymore.”
He swallowed, the long column of his throat rippling. “I know. But you could let me, anyway.”
She turned her mug around to cover the catch in her breathing. She’d lost control of this conversation in the most spectacular of ways. “Look. Obviously it would be great if someone could just magically solve my problem, but...”
Her tongue twined around a cold chuckle. The idea of him fighting for her now, after he hadn’t when she’d needed him to, was laughable. “What’s this really about? The fire, the furnace... you threatening my coworker? This isn’t because you still feel guilty, is it?”
He flinched.
“Oh, wow,” she said slowly. “Itis. Seeing me has brought back memories, and you think you can fix the past by fixing this. Well, news flash, you can’t. Nothing’ll ever change what happened. How it ended.”
“Aubs, I—” He cut himself off, strangled. “I know that. I know you’ll never forgive me. And you shouldn’t, because what I did was stupid.Iwas stupid. But I’m not that dumb fuck kid anymore. Or... Jesus Christ, maybe I am. I don’t even know.” He slammed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose.
Aubrey plunked down her tea, her throat dry. She hadn’t even been back a day, and here she was, having a heart-to-heart with the man who’d broken hers. “Look, thanks for the help, but I shouldn’t have told you all that.”
His eyes shot open. Those black mirrors reflected the firelight, and suddenly she could see everything—the dark heat brimming behind them, inside him, a whole seething landscape he kept locked away and only let show in the rarest of moments.
Like this one.
Her heart lurched around in her chest as if searching for a place to hide. She inched back. “This was a mistake. I think you should go.”
“Yeah, I fuckingknowI should go. I really, really do.”
But he made no move to leave. Silence piled in, freighted with memory, saturated with heartbreak, and she fled its weight by getting to her feet. Anything to sunder the open connection his eyes were begging her for.
She couldn’t remember why she’d wanted to see that vulnerability in the first place. Last time, answering it had nearly cost her everything.
“You know the way out.” She scooped up both mugs and hobbled away as quickly as her bad ankle would allow.
But when she reached the doorway, something stopped her, some awful pocket of yearning his presence had drilled down into and broken open. She paused and spoke over her shoulder. “I just want to know one thing. Do you regret it? Would you change what happened, if you could go back?”
There it was. The question that had haunted her for years, out in the open now.
Behind her, Nick made a throaty, broken sound. Aubrey tensed, already knowing what it meant, already collapsing like a shell of ashes around a burned-away heart of wood.
“I regret hurting you,” he said. “But no, I wouldn’t change it.”
She closed her eyes and dragged in a breath while her bones dissolved like wetted plaster. Honestly, what had she expected?
“But,” he continued, “it’s not that simp—”
“Good night, Nick.”
She brought the mugs to the sink and washed them out with water that emerged from the tap miraculously hot, then took her time setting them in the drying rack.
By the time she ventured back to the fire, the living room was empty, even though she hadn’t heard him go.
