“Let me do it right. Please.”
For the first time since I had found her again, every shield I had used around her fell apart. The threat, the anger, the need for control, all of it burned away until there was nothing left but the truth.
And the truth was simple.
I wanted her back badly enough to beg.
Chapter Twelve
Edwina
Beinghere,standingthisclose to him, feeling everything I had worked so hard to bury rise again, was dangerous in more ways than one. It threatened the life I had built, the peace I had fought for, and the truth I had kept hidden for years. If I stayed any longer, I was not sure I would have the strength to protect any of it.
The moment I stepped outside, I drew the cold air into my lungs, hoping it would settle the chaos inside me. For a few seconds, I stayed there on the street, trying to let the distance become real again. He was behind that door now. I was outside. That should have made me feel safe.
It wasn’t.
My hands still trembled, so I curled them into fists and pressed my fingers against my palms, trying to remind myselfthat I was no longer standing in front of him. His voice was not in my ear. His eyes were not on me. His hands were not touching my face. Still, my body had not caught up with the truth yet.
I reached into my bag and pulled out my phone because I needed something ordinary to hold on to, a piece of the life I had built without Hayden in it. The screen lit up at once.
Missed calls and messages.
Giselle. Daniel.
A breath slipped out of me as I stared at the notifications. Then I saw the time, and my stomach dropped.
By now, I should have been at work, in my classroom, speaking about grammar, assignments, lectures, anything safe enough to keep my mind from falling apart. Instead, I was standing outside Hayden’s apartment, trying to gather pieces of myself that no longer fit the way they had before I walked through his door.
How was I supposed to explain this to my department? To anyone?
I lowered the phone and pushed it back into my bag, as if delaying the calls would make them easier to face.
Thanks to Hayden.
Again.
He had stepped back into my life with the same force he had always carried, unsettling everything I had worked so hard to keep in place. His presence alone seemed to know where to press, what to disturb, and how to reach the parts of me I had spent years trying to protect.
I should have been angry. I wanted to hold on to that anger, to use it as proof that leaving had been right and never looking back had been the only choice I could make. Anger had kept me standing for years. It had helped me build a life he could not touch.
Yet as I stood there with the cold against my skin and silence around me, something far more unsettling rose beneath it.
I had missed him.
The truth came quietly, and that made it worse. It was not a passing thought or some softened memory time had made easier to carry. It lived deeper than that, in a place I had never managed to reach, no matter how many times I told myself I had buried him.
I had missed his touch, the warmth of his hand against my skin, the way his voice changed when he said my name. I had missed how he looked at me as if the rest of the world had fallen away, and God help me, I had missed the way he kissed me.
My fingers tightened around the strap of my bag as the realization settled inside me. I should not have felt any of it. I should have been stronger than this. Still, denial would not make the truth disappear.
I could still feel him.
It was there in my skin, in my breath, in the way my body had answered him before my mind could stop it. Years had passed, and somehow that part of me had not changed. That truth frightened me more than anything he had said, because it meant that even after everything I had survived, a part of me had never fully let him go.
And I had no idea how to fix that anymore.
I did not realize how long I had been standing there until the cold slipped through my coat and pulled me into the present again, the street beneath my feet, the phone waiting in my bag, and the life that still existed beyond Hayden and the dangerous pull of everything I could not afford to feel again.