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“Noah,” I breathe, tears stinging my eyes. “I want to work this out. I don’t want to fight with you anymore.”

“Who’s fighting, babe?”

“We are!” I scream, jumping up from the couch, motioning between the two of us as he scoffs. “We’ve never been like this before, Noah, and I’m scared that if we don’t work this out now and put it behind us, it’s going to end us.”

He rolls his eyes as he stands and turns to the kitchen. “We’ll be fine.”

“No, we won’t! And I refuse to just sit here and watch us fall apart. Either you come back here and we work this out now or you can leave. We’ve always loved to argue, Noah, but we’ve never felt this far apart. I’ve never felt so much distance between us.”

“So now you’re giving me ultimatums?” he asks, spinning back to me and I shake my head.

“No, I just want to fix this. I’ve never felt more alone than I do right now.”

He arches a brow as he crosses his arms over his chest. “Not even when you ignored me for seven years?”

“Don’t,” I snap, pointing a finger at him. “You know why I couldn’t come see you.”

He crosses the room until he’s inches from me, pain clouding his green eyes. “Just say it, Kady,” he spits. “Say you blame me for being kidnapped, raped, and for losing our son.” He grabs my face in his hands. “Open your mouth and say what we both already know.”

“No,” I hiss, ripping my face from his grip. “I won’t say it because I don’t blame you.”

“Liar.”

I shriek and grab his t-shirt in my fists, shaking him. “Will you just listen to me? I don’t blame you!”

“I don’t believe you,” he growls, wrapping his fingers around my wrist and prying them off his shirt. “We both know if you would have never met me, this would have never happened to you.”

“We don’t know that. Oliver had his eye on me before you ever came along. Or did you forget that part?”

“Whatever,” he snaps, releasing me and turning back to the kitchen.

“Don’t walk away from me, Noah.”

He pauses for a moment before he continues into the kitchen and grabs a beer out of the fridge. As he opens it and takes a drink, he turns back to me.

“I was really angry for a really long time,” I tell him, hoping I can find a way to break through this stony exterior he’s adopted. “But maybe I blamed you for not listening to me when I asked you to leave the club but I never, not once, blamed you for anything Oliver did to me.”

“Stop lying.”

“I’m not!”

He scoffs and turns away from me, shaking his head.

“I don’t blame you, Noah,” I say again, hoping if he hears them enough times, maybe he’ll finally start to believe the words. He whirls back around, his eyes blazing, and slams the can of beer on the counter.

“Why not?! You have every right to blame me! Every single fucking decision I’ve made since the moment I met you led to all the horrible shit you went through! It’s all my goddamn fault!” he yells, his voice on the brink of breaking and my chest aches as tears sting my eyes. I take a step toward him and he takes another one back. I barely hold back a sob.

“So, what do you want to do? How can we fix this because you bulldozed your way back into my life and now I’m not willing to let you go.”

He shakes his head. “I should just leave. Maybe if I run far away from here, far away from you, you’ll finally be able to be happy one day.”

“That’s what you want?” I spit, pain pulsing through me at the thought of him leaving me. How can he really think this is any kind of solution? He sighs and meets my eyes as he nods.

“Yeah, that’s what I want.”

I stumble back, almost as if he hit me but it’s just the force of his words knocking me off balance and my chest tightens as I struggle to suck in a breath.

“You want to leave me?”