Page 150

I came up behind her and hugged her. She tensed. My stomach dropped.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

She wriggled slowly away from me, like she was shrugging out of a dirty jacket and didn’t want to touch more of it than she had to.

She turned to look at me with bloodshot eyes. “I’m going home.”

I swallowed. “Okay…” I said. “I’ll go with you.”

“No.”

My heart was picking up. “All right. When will you be back?”

“I’m never going to live with you, Jacob.”

It was like a dagger that came out of nowhere.

“I’m never going to live with you, and I’m never going to marry you. If you want that, find someone else.”

“I…I don’t want someone else—”

“Well, maybe you should.” She stared at me red-eyed and defiant. Like it was me against her all of a sudden.

I shook my head. “Why are you fighting with me?”

“I’m not,” she said, her voice clipped. “I’m just telling you the way it is.”

I licked my lips. “Look. What happened last night was traumatic. Let’s talk about it—”

“No.”

I studied her face.

“Briana,” I said carefully. “I’m not going to do to you what he did. If you’re worried about that—”

She burst into laughter. Deep, guttural laughs like I’d never heard from her.

“You don’t know what you’ll never do,” she said. “Maybe you’ll get sick of me. Maybe you’ll meet someone else you can’t live without. And then I’ll come home early and my Bluetooth will connect to your phone when I pull into the garage and I’ll get to hear my friend telling my husband of ten years how much she enjoyed fucking him on my new duvet.” She cracked up, like this was hilarious.

“Oh,” she said like she just remembered. “And then he leaves me for her, and while they’re in my house, eating off my plates and sleeping in my bed, I miscarry our baby. Alone. In my shitty childhood bedroom with my shitty Smallville posters on the walls. Which worked out great for him because he didn’t want my baby anyway.”

I blinked at her. “I…I had no idea that happened to you—”

“Well, it did. And no, you won’t do that to me, Jacob. Because I won’t let you.” She grabbed the handle of her luggage and started for the door. “I don’t live here. I want to go home. I want my mom.”

I grabbed her wrist. “Briana, I’m not him—”

She yanked her arm away from me. “Every man is him! You are all the fucking same!” Her voice cracked on the last word. “You aren’t until you are.” Her breath was coming out shaky. “You won’t like me once you really know me, or you’ll find someone else or you’ll want something different and then you’ll leave. So just do it now. Save me the trouble.”

My chest was rising and falling, sheer panic pulsing inside me. I didn’t know what to say. Everything I said was making it worse, and I didn’t know what to do.

Her face changed a dozen times in the long seconds we looked at each other. Anger. Hurt. Sadness. Fear. And then finally something softer and resigned and broken.

“I need to be alone right now, Jacob,” she whispered. “Just…leave me alone.”

And she left.

Chapter 45