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“Neither you nor I know what conclusions you’d come to about this. But I can tell you what I do know.” He kept his gaze trained on her, and even though he wanted to, he didn’t look away. “I’ve been back here in Montana for eight years. I’ve never changed my phone number. I told you where I was going. If you’d wanted to, at any time in those eight years, you could have reached out to me, and you didn’t.” She started to say something, but he shook his head. “I’m not saying that you should have. I’m saying that you didn’t. You can’t remember how you actually feel about this. Because when you did feel all of it? You wanted nothing to do with me.”

“I just don’t think—” she started.

“I don’t have it in me to betray you all over again,” he belted out then. “Do you think I don’t want to? Do you think that you not being able to remember exactly how this all went down doesn’t sound like the second chance I’ve been waiting for? Because of course it does.”

He was breathing too hard. And she was staring back at him, but not like she was afraid of him. Not like she hated him.

“I would love nothing more than to keep all of these things to myself and lose myself in you all over again,” he told her, though every word felt like ash in his mouth. “But I’m telling you, that’s not what you actually want. You just can’t remember what you do want.”

He could see that that wasn’t landing. She was studying him as if she was looking for weaknesses, not as if she had suddenly decided that he was making all kinds of sense.

And Dallas didn’t know how much more of this he had in him. He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to stand here, virtuously arguing against everything he’d ever wanted, when he really wasn’t kidding. This was a dream come true. There wasn’t one single part of him that didn’t want to just say, fuck it, and get his hands on her again.

Ruthie was an addiction that he’d never quit. She’d quit him, and maybe saved them both at the same time. He had to assume that at the very least, she’d saved herself.

While he’d been up here in Montana, building foolish monuments in the middle of nowhere to a life he’d already ruined.

“I want to see,” she said.

Dallas took that in, turned it over in his head, and still didn’t know what she was talking about. “See what?” He jerked his chin at the box in front of her. “You looked through all the pictures. There’s other stuff in that box. Little things. Mementos, I guess. They’re all yours if you want them.”

“I don’t want them.”

She uncurled herself from the couch and stood up. And he really didn’t need to be standing here, thinking about how good she looked in literally everything. How he could get lost for longer than he liked to admit thinking about the muscles in her athletic thighs and how flexible she always was, and how very much he would like her to wrap those thighs around his head and let him—

See? he asked himself harshly. You’re just an addict. Always have been, always will be.

But she was moving toward him. And he wanted to step away, because surely that was safer, but it felt too much like a cowardly retreat. So he didn’t.

And that was a mistake, because she was standing right in front of him now.

Much too close.

“I want to see,” she said again. “I want to know what you’re talking about. This overpowering chemistry. This magnetism that pulled us together despite everything. That was, apparently, our entire relationship for half a decade.”

“What do you mean you want to see?” And Dallas could admit to himself that maybe, just maybe, he was ever so slightly panicked at that suggestion.

Because he couldn’t think of anything he wanted more. And every single part of his body was reacting with predictable enthusiasm at the very idea.

“I can’t remember any of it.” And Ruthie’s eyes were edging toward some kind of bright gold and soft blue blend that he recognized all too well. “I think you should kiss me, so we’re both on the same page.”

“I don’t need to be on that page,” he gritted out at her, like a man at the gallows. “I burned all the pages already. This is what I’m trying to tell you.”

“Who knows?” And she said that with a certain bland innocence that made his fingers itch to haul her toward him. “Maybe all of that terrifying chemistry is gone. Maybe if we kiss now, I won’t really be her, so none of this will matter. Maybe it only exists when we both remember all of it. Don’t you want to know?”

“I don’t. I mean, I—”

Was he stuttering?

Dallas had never stuttered in his life.

Ruthie moved closer and tilted her head back, and he knew she couldn’t remember him. He didn’t think she was pretending that, and he was convinced she wouldn’t have been able to fake it even if she’d wanted to.

He would have seen it. He would have known. That was the problem—they’d always known each other far better than they should have.

But that didn’t mean that he was capable of standing this close to her and not wanting her.

“I’m telling you, this is a terrible idea,” he told her, sounding something a little too close to desperate, to his ear.