Page 53 of 7 Nights of Sin

Chapter 17

Kevin

I’d fucked up.

I knew I’d fucked up as I watched Caro put more distance between us, eyes furious, hands balled into fists. She looked furious, and she wasn’t giving me the chance to explain, but I knew I couldn’t let her walk away before she knew why I’d done it.

There was a serious chance it wouldn’t change how upset she was, but I had to tell her.

"Wait," I said, holding out a hand to stop her. "Just...wait. There's something you don't know, okay? There's..." I sighed, slumping a bit where I stood. It wasn't supposed to be this hard to tell her how I felt. The whole point of the past week was to see if she felt the same and try and get her on the same page with me.

And somehow I still wasn't clear on where I stood. She was angry with me right then and there, but it wasn't the cold kind of anger where she bottled it up and just stopped talking. It was the kind that made her yell and stomp and look like she wanted to wring my neck.

The passion in her face was beautiful, but I gave myself a mental slap because it really wasn't the time to fixate on that.

"What?" Caro demanded, arms folded. "What could you possibly have to say that would make this better?"

"I don't know if it's going to make it better," I admitted because in all likelihood, it was just going to make her more upset with me. But at least the truth would be out, and she could do with it what she wanted to.

"I staged the pictures, yes," I said. "But it was because I...I wanted to get you to come out here, and I didn't think there was another way to do it. I knew if I invited you, you wouldn't come, and I knew there was no way I could make this work if we were back in New York. There was too much going on."

"Make what work?" she snapped, brow furrowed in a deep frown.

"This. You and me. I want...Caro, you have to know how much I want you by now. I just spent the last seven nights trying to make sure there was no doubt about that. You're everything to me."

"Stop it," she said. "Stop it, Kevin. You don't know me. You don't...you can't say that. You already had a chance, and you didn't want me--"

"I did! Caro, I did want you. I thought you were going to do the same thing. I thought we were at a point where we had to follow some dreams and leave others behind. I didn't know you wanted to stay together, and if I had..."

She shook her head, and her folded arms seemed more like she was trying to hold herself together. "You didn't even ask. You just...ended it. Just like that. And now you expect me to believe you did all this just to get me back? You could have destroyed your career."

"I know. But I trusted you to fix it. I knew you could. I believed in you from the second I realized you were the one who was going to be handling this. Because you've never let anything get in your way. You're the most determined person I've ever met, and that's saying something because I'm pretty determined myself." I sighed and stepped closer to her, holding her gaze with my own. "I want to be with you, Caro. I want to cook for you when I'm home and I want to call you and tell you to stop working so late. And I want to be there when you ignore me and come home at eleven at night, to rub your shoulders and run you a bath and bring you ice cream. Whatever you need. And I want you to be there when I have bad games and when my coach is riding my ass and driving me nuts."

I poured it all out to her, all of my feelings, laying it at her feet. It was harder than I expected it to be, knowing there was a very real chance she would reject me and walk away anyway.

People always thought I was the kind of person who could get whatever he wanted, but there were some things that might have been outside of my reach. Like Caro, if she decided that this was too big for her to deal with.

I hadn't considered that when I came up with the plan, I could admit. It was the kind of thing where I'd just come up with the plan and hoped it would work, blind to the negatives because the positives seemed so tempting.

But as time passed and she just stood there, not saying anything, all those negatives were pretty damned hard to ignore.

"Please say something," I said finally, trying to prompt her.

She sighed, shaking her head. "I don't know what to say, Kevin. You're an idiot. You're so stupid. You could have ruined everything just because you...you wanted me. And that's just so..." She shook her head again. "I don't even know. I don't know what to do with that."

"You could just tell me how you feel," I murmured, trying not to sound like I was begging.

"I feel angry," she said. "And used a little bit. I feel like you don't think before you do things, and you're so used to things working out for you no matter how stupid they are that you never stop to consider what might happen if they don't. What if I say no? What if I walk away right now and tell you not to follow me? Not to contact me again."

Each word weighed heavy on my chest, but I took it, standing there in the darkness of the beach, some distance still from the house. "Then I'll accept that," I told her. "It's your call."

Her eyes narrowed. "If I told you to fuck off, you would?"

I nodded. "Yeah. If that would make you happy."

Somehow I didn't think it would, but I wasn't going to press my luck and say that. Caro was the sort of person who would ignore her own feelings just to prove a point, and I didn't want to force her hand and tempt her to do that.

"I need to think," she said finally. "This is all... It was already too much, and now there's more on top of it, and I can't make a decision right now. I have an early flight in the morning, and I need to finish packing."

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