I shouldn’t have been surprised. Nothing I did was ever good enough. For anyone.
No matter how hard I tried, no matter how much my decisions improved, I couldn’t break through that last barrier.
“You trying to get rid of me, firefly?” Remi’s sharp inhale was enough of an answer, and I let out a bitter laugh. “Yeah, I guess so.”
She stepped forward, resting her hand on my arm. “No. I’m giving you credit for time spent helping, and—” Her voice wobbled. “And I’m taking this out from over our heads.”
My gaze locked on hers. “What?”
“This.” She pointed back to the shelter. “I cannot process any clear way forward while we’re in this position.”
“Do you regret kissing me?” I asked. Her eyes flashed with something, and I didn’t like whatever it was. Because after that flash was a pause. “Do you?”
Remi sucked in a shaky breath. “Archer, I—”
“Do you regret it?” I asked again. My voice tore through each syllable like someone ripped them from my throat.
She licked her lips, closing her eyes and sucking in a fortifying breath. “Your dad was right. It looks like the worst kind of cliché if something happens between us right now.”
“I don’t give a fuck what it looks like to other people.”
“I do,” she yelled. When my head reared back, she closed her eyes and softened her tone. “Ido. I have a job that I depend on, and I have a son who is looking to me to learn lessons about how a person conducts themselves with integrity. I have already messed up in so many ways when it comes to you, Archer. I told him not to judge people by their mistakes, and that’s exactly what I did. I punished you when it wasn’t my job. I let you in when I kept reminding myself that I needed to keep you at arm’s length.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I kissed you. I kissed you knowing that it meant something, and knowing that I shouldn’t.”
A fat tear slid down her cheek, and my chest caved in at the sight of it.
“I have to draw a line somewhere around ... whatever this is. And I care how it looks to the world when I will be the one at their mercy, without a multimillion-dollar paycheck to get me through, and asonwho will have to live with the consequences of their judgment. Who will have to live with the consequences of a choice he had no part in making.”
Rage—useless, cold, helpless rage—coursed through me, and I tipped my head back and gritted my teeth. I wanted to scream obscenities at the sky, just to let something out, but I didn’t.
I hated every fucking word, but I couldn’t argue with a single one.
Knowing she was right spun a tight web of anger deep in my belly, the intricate strings tangled up in everything so thoroughly that instead of trying to tear them out, I let myself get stuck dead center.
That anger loosened my tongue.
“But you can’t tell me you don’t want me.” The words landed like a blow, and Remi sucked in a shocked breath. “Can you tell me that?”
Her bottom lip trembled. “Don’t. Don’t do this.”
“Why? Because you can’t give me a clear answer?” I stepped forward, frustration heating my skin, clawing just under the surface and desperate for air. “You can’t even tell me what you feel right now, Remi, and it’s not that fucking hard.”
“Yes, it is.” Her eyes blazed, and it made me realize I might not be the only one on the cusp of boiling over. What would she be like in her anger? I’d seen it once. And fuck if I didn’t want to see it again. “The second we start doing that, it ups the stakes, and they are already high enough.”
I took a step closer. “Tell me you don’t want me.”
“Archer, please,” she whispered.
“I wantyou.” I held her gaze, even though my ribs squeezed against my lungs and I could hardly take in a breath. Even though it was the scariest thing I’d ever done in my entire life. “I want you, more than all the complications and the doubts. And I want to know if you feel the same.”
It didn’t have the intended result. This wasn’t a movie where I could push and push and push until her only course of action was to submit to a kiss that would change nothing, would heal nothing, only serving to make us feel good for a fleeting moment.
Of the two of us, Remi had a better handle on what all this meant in the bigger picture.
No, her anger didn’t flare like mine. She didn’t match me step for step. All I could see was a broken heart.
She cried quietly, closing her eyes and pressing her hand to her chest. The anger had drained out of her and, with the sound of her tears, out of me too. This roller coaster we’d built, out of stolen moments and untapped tension, finally seemed to have taken the fight out of both of us.
Taken the fight out of me.