Page 103 of Love Him Like Water

“What?”

“I’m here with you,” I said. “Which means I had a good enough argument to give that guard dog of a big brother you got to have him let me in. Think maybe if he thought it was good enough, you can too?” I asked.

She said nothing to that, but I was going to go ahead and take her silence as agreement.

“I didn’t think you’d want me around, mouse. Until Cinna told me, I didn’t know you chose to marry me. I thought you were forced. And I figured, because of that, you wouldn’t want shit to do with me. I thought I was giving you freedom to do whatever you wanted without me breathing down your neck. Never thought that you’d actually want me around.”

“I did,” she said, that voice sounding so small and sad again. “But all you ever wanted was to sleep with me,” she added, and I winced, hoping that part wasn’t loud enough for her brother to overhear.

I slid down the bed, turning onto my side to face her, so our faces were close, even though she still had hers stuffed in the pillow.

I pitched my voice lower, definitely not wanting Nico to hear this part. “I’m not going to try to say you’re wrong about that. I did want to sleep with you. I still want to sleep with you. But it was wrong of me to make you feel like that’s all you were good for. That’s… that’s not fucking true.”

To that, I got a snort.

“I see now how you were trying, mouse,” I said. “And I just kept fucking missing it. I’m not trying to make excuses, but I’m not good at this shit.”

“What shit?” she asked, and I couldn’t help but let my lips curve up at the sound of her cursing. Guess I was rubbing off on her in some ways, it seemed.

“Relationships.”

“You have plenty of relationships,” she shot back. And, hey, that was a good argument. She’d been around the apartment during many parties. She’d seen me interacting with a ton of fucking people.

Of course she wanted to know why I couldn’t do the same with her.

“We had some good moments, right?” I asked. “There were times when we were getting along. Figure maybe that’s the only reason you stayed as long as you did.”

“I stayed because I…” she trailed off, catching herself. I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to be even more vulnerable with me.

“Wish you’d told me,” I said, my fingers moving from her scalp, down her jaw.

The barely-there touch had her face moving out from the pillow, wanting more.

I was good at that, at least.

My fingers moved over her jaw, across her lips, down her nose.

It wasn’t until I stopped touching her that her eyes fluttered open.

“Fuck, mouse,” I said, wincing at the evidence of all that crying Nico had told me about. “I don’t deserve tears like that,” I said, running a finger over her swollen eyelid, then down her splotchy cheek. “Never wanted you to cry over me.”

“I’ve cried over you a lot,” she admitted, her lower lip trembling like she might just do so again.

“I didn’t know,” I told her.

“You were never there to,” she shot back.

“You’re right,” I agreed. “There’s a lot going on with work right now. But that’s not an excuse not to come home to you and give you what you need. I just… I had no fucking idea what you needed. Figured I had… two things to offer you.”

“Two things?” she asked.

“Money,” I admitted, shrugging that off. “And making you come for me.”

“Stop,” she said, blinking suddenly glistening eyes.

“Stop what?” I asked, heartbeat tripping faster, not sure what I’d done wrong already.

“Stop trying to use sex to fix our problems.”

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