Because it was her kiss goodbye.
“I came by for more than giving back the ring,” she said, breaking our kiss. “I’m leaving.”
I tightened my arms around her. “We’ll leave together. Go to my flat. We can work things out there.”
“Not leaving your office,” she clarified. “Leaving London. Leaving the UK. I’m going back home.”
“Home?” I asked, agitated. “Explain yourself, Charlotte, because your home is with me.”
She pushed away from me. “There’s nothing to explain. I’m going to America and I’m never going to see you again.”
I think even then I still hadn’t truly believed her, not really. But within a week her flat was empty and she was unenrolled from UCL. She was gone. And the only comfort I had was that somewhere across the ocean, she was fulfilling the promise of that brilliant mind. A promise that was at least undimmed by a connection with me. If nothing else, I spared her that.
“So now you know,” I tell her. “I didn’t want to tell you, then or last night, because it was so incredibly foolish of me. Selfish, and unforgivably so. But you deserved the truth as much as you deserved my shame, and I didn’t give it to you. I’m so sorry, little one. I owed it to you, just as I owe you so much else.”
All at once, all the fight seems to leave her. She closes her eyes, her body going still beneath mine. “Now I know,” she murmurs, as if to herself. “Now I know.”
I drop my forehead to her cheek, and for a moment, we just breathe. Joined together in this wound I gave her.
I know it can’t last. We’re cold and sticky and tangled, and I haven’t forgotten that she needs to get back to work, but the very idea of separating from heragainhas me miserable. I curl my fingers in her cheap work shirt and root through her curls to bury my nose in her scent. She smells clean and floral, like she’s just removed a crown of flowers from her hair, and I can’t get enough of it.
“I have to go,” she says.
“You didn’t even murder me. Would you still like to?”
She sighs, and it’s not a happy sigh or an amused sigh—or any kind of good sigh. It’s the sigh of someone so hurt and so tired that each breath feels like work.
“No, Church,” she says wearily. “I don’t want to murder you.”
I raise up so I can look down at her. A tiny flame of hope curls in my chest. “You don’t?”
“That doesn’t mean I forgive you,” she says pointedly. “And I would like very much never to see you again after this.”
I stare down into her perfect face—pert and freckled and stubborn. Can I give her my absence? Now that I know she’s here in London? That she’s been suffering?
Was I ever capable of it?
Am I a moral man?
Can I be for her?
“Is that what you want from me? Is that theonlything you want from me?”
Fuck, this feels worse than bleeding out, than burning, than emptiness and ashes. This is bleedingin, this is growing something brand new, just for her. And it hurts. It hurts worse than anything, because before I had no choice, but now I’m agreeing. I’m agreeing to lose her once again.
She hesitates, then the stubbornness reasserts itself in the pull of her mouth and the jut of her chin. “Yes.”
“Then you have my word.”
She narrows her eyes up at me. “Nothing’s ever this easy with you.”
Jesus Christ.Easy?She thinks this is going to beeasy? I push up to my feet, wrapping my hands around her elbows and setting her on her own feet in the process. “There’s nothing easy about this, Charlotte,” I tell her in a sharp voice. “If I had my way, you’d be over my fucking shoulder right now, and I’d be hauling you to my bed where you belong. I’d have you trussed up and so thoroughly fucked that the only thing you would want to do next is nestle into my arms and sleep. I’d be with you when you woke up—then and every day after—and you would go back to the things that made you smile, and you’d stop all this nonsense.” I nod at her uniform shirt.
Her face, which had been rapt during my little speech, now grows mulish.
“It’s my nonsense, Church. And you’renotgoing to have it your way. Even gods have to acknowledge free will,” she says, yanking out of my touch.
“Am I still your god then?”