“Yep. Still the worst fucking pep talk in history.”
“Just show him you love him, V. Don’t just say the words. Show him. And mean it.”
“But how do I show him?”
“I can’t answer that. I’m not sleeping with him.”
Veda stared at the door she’d yet to knock on, stomach rumbling, knowing the man who had the power to make her or break her that morning waited on the other side.
“I can cut a guy’s nards out and then go have a cappuccino, but showing Gage how much I love him? I’m at a total loss—”
She gasped when the front door swung open, ending the call without saying goodbye, wide eyes drinking him in, heart in her throat.
Halfway dressed for work in a pair of navy blue slacks and a baby blue shirt, hair still damp from his shower, Gage’s fresh scent snuck past the doorway and encased her in warmth.
The thought of losing that warmth left her speechless. Motionless. Gaping at him.
“Good morning.” His voice was still groggy with sleep.
“Good morning.”
His eyes ran her body. “You look beautiful.”
“Thanks.” Veda looked down at her pink scrubs and leather jacket. “I wore my good scrubs this morning. They’ve only been puked on twice.” Once, thanks to our baby.
“Come in,” he smirked, stepping away from the door.
Veda entered the foyer, drinking him in as he closed the door. Her fingers itched to touch his damp hair slicked back on his head. To touch any part of him, really. To have him touch her in return. To touch each other without a question mark lingering behind every stroke. Staining every kiss. Muddying every embrace. She itched to be free to love him fully once more.
Her eyes searched his face.
His lips were relaxed, eyes blank, showing no emotion, and she was instantly on edge. She wrung her hands, nibbling her bottom lip.
“Thanks for inviting me over.” Her voice sounded utterly pathetic. “We haven’t had breakfast together in…”
She couldn’t remember. All she knew was that it had been way too long.
A lump raced down his throat. Stepping away from the door, he pounded down the steps that led into his sunken foyer, heading toward the dining room without meeting her eyes. He was still barefoot, his hands in his pockets as he led the way to his white marble dining table.
Veda followed, sighing at his new M.O. His new habit of reaching out to her—either extremely early in the morning or abysmally late at night—asking for her company, and then behaving as if she was the last person he wanted to see when she was actually in his presence.
Regardless of the confusing treatment, she followed, eager for any opportunity to be near him.
She studied the two breakfast plates he’d set up on the table.
And her heart fell.
Eggs, bacon, and toast.
Just eggs, bacon, and toast… slopped onto two plates with no rhyme or reason. Not molded into the shape of some furry farm animal, or even into the shape of a sunrise—like the first breakfast he’d ever made her.
Veda knew, right then, that she should run for her life. That nothing good would come of this breakfast. She knew, just by looking at those plates, that some part of Gage was still too far to reach. That some part of him might be lost to her forever.
Terror squeezed her heart. No matter how hungry she was for the fragrant food, or how thirsty she was for the glasses of orange juice, she wouldn’t be able to enjoy any of it until she knew.
She had to know if he was gone for good.
“I wanted to ask you something.” Her voice wobbled like a teenager asking her biggest crush to prom.
Gage slowed, swiveled to face her, and leaned back on the thick marble table, crossing his arms and raising his eyebrows at her.
Veda went to speak, but nothing came on the first few tries. Every bone in her body screamed to run. Screamed that this didn’t feel right. That something had changed in him. Not just since they’d broken up, but over the last few weeks. Something was different. Something had caused him to retreat even more.
Danger, her mind screamed.
But her heart won out. “Dante’s is having a big costume party on Saturday, and I was hoping, I mean…” Her eyes fell under his unrelenting gaze, watching her wringing hands. “I mean, I was wondering…”
This will not end well.
She snuck a look at him. His face remained unchanged, so she dropped her gaze again.
Run, Veda. Run for your life.
“I was hoping you’d be my date.” She exhaled, relieved that the worst was over, but as she reclaimed his eyes, she saw that it was far from over.
He didn’t smile the way she’d imagined. But he remained. Sitting before her. Searching her eyes.
Waiting.
What was he waiting for? Realizing he’d never tell her, Veda heard Hope’s words in her head and knew Hope had been right. She had no choice but to lay her whole heart on the table. No matter how scary it was.
So when Gage went to respond, Veda jumped in.
“I want you back,” she said.
His mouth fell. The words he’d been about to say faded away. His eyes widened, breath deepening until he was one level from gasping. His crossed arms fell, and he clutched the edge of the table, muscular arms fighting to be freed from his dress shirt.
Veda used the new emotion in his eyes as fuel. “I want our engagement back. I want our future back. I want us back.”
His eyes gleamed. He craned his jaw.
“I know that I hurt you, Gage. To the point that you can’t even look at me sometimes. To the point that you can barely talk to me. And I know that’s my fault. I let my own darkness… my own demons, overflow out of me and poison our relationship. I let it poison our love. I’ve never claimed to be perfect, but I’ve still never managed to screw something up…” She made claws as the tears shook her voice. “So incredibly. Tarnish something so pure. So good. So right. What we had… What we had… has to be a once in a lifetime kind of thing. And I don’t want to lose it.”
Gage slung one arm across his stomach while dropping his face into his hand, massaging his eyes for several long moments before sliding that hand down his face. He pulled his skin with it, coming to a stop at his lips, sighing into his palm.
Silence.
Veda stepped forward, begging. “Gage—”
“I already have a date.” He dropped his hand into his lap, eyes lazily meeting hers. “To the party.”
Veda thought she’d been prepared. Prepared for the possibility of losing him forever. But she hadn’t. She hadn’t prepared herself for the way his last sentence shifted her world, so violently that she swore the floor at her feet moved. She thought she’d prepared herself for the pain, but she hadn’t. She was forced to lock her knees to keep from crumbling to the floor.
She thought she’d known regret, but she hadn’t truly known it until that moment.
“Oh,” she whispered, clapping a hand over her mouth.
Gage watched her carefully. His eyes followed her when she tried to turn away, but then realized she couldn’t, reclaiming his eyes, her own silently begging.
“I, uh…” Veda struggled, smoothing her bun with a frown. The urge to scream nearly annihilated her, making it hard to speak past the ball in her throat. “Um… who?”
Gage paused, blinking slowly. “Stephanie Cochran.”
She pictured the most statuesque woman in the hospital with a nod, pressing her lips together, the first tear spilling from her eye and jetting down her cheek.
Gage stood.
But Veda stepped back, rejecting his comfort. Rejecting his pity. She wanted him, but only if he wanted her with the same fervor. He didn’t, so she stepped away, holding her hand out.
Gage held his arms out at his sides. “She and I started talking before we…” He motioned to her. “Before we…”
“I got it,” Veda whispered.
Hope had been right all along. Sh
e’d been nothing but a booty call. Nothing but a warm, wet hole for him to partake when he was bored, while he quietly made dates with the woman he really wanted, on the side.
Recalling the day Stephanie had approached her at the hospital about asking Gage on a date, Veda didn’t know why she was shocked that Stephanie had actually followed through. Gage was nothing if not a catch. A once in a lifetime man.
“Wow.” She leaned down on her knees when the world began to spin. Every bone in her body begged her to stop the madness. To stop abusing herself this way. To walk away before she became any more of a fool.
But, once again, Veda realized that Hope had been right. She couldn’t walk away until she’d laid all her cards on the table. Even if it meant humiliating herself. She was willing to do that for him.
“Don’t go.” Veda straightened, a new fire to her voice. “Don’t go to the party with her. Don’t date her. Don’t fall in love with her. Don’t.”
Gage tilted his head at her, frowning softly.
“Break her heart,” Veda begged, her voice rising. “Break hers, but please, Gage. Please, not mine.”
“Why not?”
Veda gasped at the sudden hitch to his voice. The new hardness in his tone. The challenge in his eyes. The shift to every facet of his demeanor. The first real response she’d pulled from him in weeks. It wasn’t a happy response, no, but it was something.
He motioned to his heart with the pads of his fingers. “You broke mine. Without so much as a blink. So much as a flutter in your eye.”
He was right, and it left her sputtering.
“What you did to me, Veda, what you put me through… was an agony so out of this world…” He pressed his fingertips to both his temples, stuttering. “I can’t even form words to describe it.”
Tears raced from her eyes, so quickly she couldn’t keep up, slapping them away every second. “I know, Gage, and I’m so, so—”
“Sorry’s not enough.”
“Then what is? What does it take to get you back? I’ll do anything to make it right.”
“I’ll never let you put me through that again.”
“I’ll never put you in the position to. I swear to God, Gage—I’ll never hurt you again.”
He shook his head, and when Veda stepped forward, trying to cup his jaw, he seized her wrists and stepped back, the shake of his head picking up speed.
“No,” he said.
Her hands relocated to his chest, digging her nails into his pecs, but he removed her hands from there as well. So she took her touch to his belt buckle, going to undo it. He stopped her there, as well. The one place he’d never stopped her. Not even in anger.
He yanked her trembling fingers from the buckle of his pants. “No.”
Teeth chattering, Veda finally stepped back, covering her mouth with her hand. She let a naked silence fall, one that seemed to sneak into her body and explode, wrapping her stomach into an unbearably tight knot.
She drew in a breath through flared nostrils. “So this is really it? We’ll never be together again? You’re going to date other people? You’re going to watch me date other people? Love other people? Marry other people?”
He winched a little harder with each question.
“That’s what you want, Gage?”
“Veda, what I want is to go back in time, to the beginning of the summer, and change every decision I made from the first moment I saw you. I want to go back and not approach you at my engagement party. Not drive you home from Dante’s. Not make love to you. Not enter the relationship that ripped me limb from limb. I want to go back and not propose to you. I want to go back and choose anything but you.”
“You don’t mean that… Gage. Jesus.” She had to take a few healthy breaths to recover from every crushing blow he’d just thrown. “What we had… It was real love.”
“I didn’t know what love was then. And maybe… Maybe I don’t even know it now. Maybe, this whole time, I was just in love… with the idea of love.”
Just when she was sure he couldn’t annihilate her any more, he did. “But not in love with me?”
He searched her eyes and then looked away, cringing.
“You don’t love me?” Her voice hitched. “You never did? Ever?”
Gage kept his eyes away, slamming them closed as heat rose to his cheeks.
Veda couldn’t take much more. “I know you loved me because it’s the only way I could’ve loved you as much as I did. As much as I do. I couldn’t have done it by myself. Your love gave me the strength to love you back the same way.”
Something snapped, and his eyes flew to her, teeth bared. “When did you ever love me the same, Veda?”
“Gage—”
“Never. And I’ve made myself crazy trying to figure out how. How I managed to fall for a woman who couldn’t love me the same way, a woman I barely knew, a woman who wouldn’t open up, I have no idea. I have no idea how I could love a woman so much, who I knew was setting me up to be slaughtered, but I did…” He sucked in a breath, jamming his fingers into his heart, appearing to instantly regret the last few sentences he’d let spill from his lips.
Veda fought to remain calm. “You did know me. Better than anyone. Our love was real, and pure, and honest—”
“Honest?” He lifted his nose, releasing a breathy chuckle that somehow only made him look more angry, huffing with a soft shake of his head. “No.”
“Yes. You know me. You know me more honestly than anyone else on the planet.”
He zeroed in on her, his eyes alight. “I know you, Veda?”
“Yes.”
“Our relationship was honest?”
“Yes!”
“Yes?” His nostrils flared. “Since we’re being so honest, why don’t you tell me the real reason you crashed my engagement party the night we met?”
Her heart stopped. Not at the question, but at the fact that he’d known, all along, that the original answer had been a lie. How many other lies had he detected on her lips without calling them out? There had been so many, she’d lost count. But they hadn’t been designed to hurt him. Only to protect him. To protect him from her.
“I told you…” She tried to smile, to make light of the randomness of his question, but the weight of the world hung too heavily on her shoulders. She knew his question wasn’t really random at all. It was the kind of question that was much bigger than it seemed. The kind of question that had the potential to explode into twenty more if she gave a wrong answer. “I told you… I crashed your party for the free booze.”
“You’re lying.”
Veda clapped her mouth shut.
He moved closer, eyes falling to her lips. Just as she predicted, another question immediately followed the one she’d given the wrong answer to. “Why did you disappear in the middle of the night, every night, when you believed I was asleep?”
Veda went to answer, wanting nothing more than to tell him the truth. But what could she say? That she’d crashed his engagement party to scope out the ten terrible men whose balls she’d be removing? That she disappeared in the middle of the night, every night, to follow them all over town and learn their schedules so she could decide the best place to carry out her attacks? That she’d been led to believe he was number ten on that list of terrible men, which was what had driven her to make the colossal mistake of ending their engagement?
“Where the hell do you go when you disappear into your head like you are right now?” Gage demanded. “Is it a place you go when the truth and the lies start getting too muddled? Too difficult to keep track of? Are you thinking up your next lie right now? Why do I have to drag everything out of you? Why do I have to beg you to share yourself with me? Why won’t you ever do it on your own?”
Veda searched his eyes and tried to speak, but nothing came.
Gage reared back, his eyes wide. “I can’t do this.”
“Gage, please. I want to work this out—”
“I don’t.”
She gasped, clap
ping her lips shut.
“I can’t, Veda.” His voice lowered, defeated.
It hit her. How deep the hurt she’d caused him truly ran. How much deeper she was capable of taking it if she managed to get him back.
How selfish she was.
She blinked rapidly, the tears in her eyes dry. Not because her heart hurt any less, but because reality was hitting her like a rocket.
To be the woman Gage deserved, things would have to be different. She would have to be different. And she knew that wasn’t possible. Not until she’d finished exorcising the darkness that had been eating her alive for ten years. She could no longer use Gage to help temporarily drive that darkness away. Not when it came at the expense of his light being diminished.
And diminished, it was. His eyes, exhausted as they glared across the room at her. His skin, robbed of its natural olive color, so ashen white he looked post mortem. His breath, each one coming a little shorter than the last, sending his hand to his heart as if he feared it was moments from stopping completely.
Veda stared at that hand over his heart, knowing she was only destined to cause it more pain. To take the one million knives she’d impaled it with and turn it to a million and one. It wasn’t possible to love him without hurting him. It wasn’t possible to love him without poisoning him with her sickness.
It wasn’t fair to even try.
He deserved better.
He deserved more.
He deserved love.
From anyone but her.
“You’re right…” Her eyes lowered, causing the moisture that had been bubbling on the edges to spill over, barely hearing her own words. “You should—” Her voice broke, and she covered her lips with the back of her hand, trying to collect herself, keeping her gaze down as her wobbly voice struggled to rebound, coming out a hoarse whisper. “You should definitely go to the party with Stephanie—”
The words nearly choked her.
He moved closer, but she couldn’t look up. She knew this was goodbye, and she couldn’t finish it while looking in his eyes. So when his body, his aura, his debilitating scent all moved in, when his trembling hand reached for her, she stepped away.
Yearn (Revenge Book 4) Page 20