Page 55 of Into Pitch

His gaze finally tears from mine to flick around the space.

“It will have to do.”

Rage bursts again through me. “Get out of my bus.”

“No,” he repeats.

I shove him back again and he falls back a step, and I hate that a part of me knows he let me do it.

“I swear to God, if you don’t leave, I will scream. I will call Imogen. I will—”

“You won’t,” he slices.

The certainty in his voice makes my throat tighten around my next breath. “Because you don’t want witnesses. Not yet, at least. Not when you’re still deciding what this is to you.”

“Just get out, Alex. You—you don’t get to do the psychoanalyzing bullshit when I am very clearly telling you what I want.”

“Sit,” he commands, the words gentle.

My skin prickles and I shift angrily on my feet. “No. I won’t.”

His gaze flicks to the couch-length bench then back to me.

“Stand,” he offers.

My breath stutters in an echoed act of that mirrored room.

“Or we can move on. Together.”

I hold my ground, folding my arms to my chest.

“You aren’t welcome here.”

He hums and pushes away, his expression unreadable as he heads for the door. I watch each step away from me, ignoring the piece of me that wants to grab him and drag him back. To tell him to keep fighting with me, because fighting is better than being left alone again.

But we can’t do this.

It’s toxic and wrong on so many levels.

The door closes behind him and I let the silence swallow me whole. Trying to be okay with the choice I have made.

Chapter twenty-three

Chapter 23

I sit in my car far longer than necessary just across the road from her bus after I leave.

The engine is quiet, the interior dim, and the cracked windshield of the bus is still visible through the trees behind the bar. The car’s heater ticks as it cools, a soft metallic sound that gives my thoughts something to pace against.

The environment she is in now is inadequate.

That is the problem.

Her bus is a nest built from necessity, not intention. There are too many exits and opportunities for interruption. Far too much noise bleeding in from the world she insists on surviving inside of. The variables stack like kindling.

It is not a controlled space, and she is not a woman who thrives in chaos. She endures it, sure, but she sharpens herself against it. She doesn’t need to steel herself off, she needs to come undone and stay that way. Let everything in so that she can process it in a way that won’t be hindered by all the noise around her.

I close my eyes and see her again standing in front of me. Letting myself remember the feeling of her chest against mine as her breath came in unsteady, the sight of her pupils when they had blown with something she is fighting tooth and nail.