Page 100 of Tell Me Something True

But, although there was a sharp pang in his chest, his heart still beat. Despite how unsteady he was, he was still standing. Even though his fingers trembled so hard, he had to set down his beer and his legs wanted to shake so badly, he had to lock his knees.

He might be bruised and battered, but he was still whole.

She wouldn’t be the thing that finally broke him.

He did enough damage on his own.

Like buying that goddamn ring in the first place.

He’d hid it, telling himself when the time was right, he’d ask her to marry him. That he’d make sure it was the perfect moment. The perfect proposal. She’d say yes and they’d move to Mount Laurel.

And have the perfect life.

When she left, when she didn’t come back, he’d taken that ring and tossed it in the Monongahela river.

“Leave,” he said, low and hoarse and a hell of a lot calmer than he actually felt. “Now.”

“I was snooping,” she said, as if he hadn’t just told her, for the second time, to get out of his house. He changed his mind about her newfound confidence. Her stubbornness. It was a pain in his ass. “Looking for something, anything, that would prove you weren’t nearly as flawless as you seemed.”

He narrowed his eyes, his fingers tightening on the bottle. “What?”

“You were too good to be true. I knew it couldn’t last. When we first got together, I figured it was only a matter of time before you showed your true colors.”

“You never trusted me, did you?”

Holding his gaze, hers steady and filled with something unreadable, she shook her head. “I couldn’t. I didn’t know how.”

He got that now. He did. Hearing just that one story about her childhood gave him more insight into her past, into what she’d gone through, than in all the months they’d been together.

Helped him see her more clearly.

But it still gutted him. Her doubts about him. Her mistrust.

“I kept telling myself you were going to do something to prove I was right to have doubts,” she continued. “When that didn’t happen, I started looking for evidence that you were sleeping around or hiding a secret family or dealing drugs on the side. Instead, I found the ring. It was so beautiful. The most beautiful piece of jewelry I’d ever seen. I wanted so badly to try it on. To see it on my finger. But I knew I couldn’t handle that. That I didn’t deserve to see how it would look, because I knew I would never wear it.” Pushing away from the counter, she wiped her palms down the front of her thighs. “I left the next day.”

“If you didn’t want to marry me,” he ground out, “you could have just said no. You didn’t have to leave without a fucking word.”

At least then he would have had a reason. He would have known what he’d done to push her away.

“No. I couldn’t have. Even though you kept our relationship a secret from your family—”

“It wasn’t a—”

“—even though I couldn’t trust you, even though you only wanted me because I filled some void in your life—”

“That,” he growled, slapping his beer bottle onto the counter with a loud crack, “is bullshit.”

“—if you’d asked me to marry you, I would have said yes.”

His head snapped back so hard, so fast, his teeth clacked together. And just like that, the thin strand of control he’d been clinging to so tightly for the past ten years snapped. “Why are you doing this? Is this a fucking game to you?”

“It’s not a game. It’s what you wanted. It’s the truth. I wouldn’t have been able to say no. Not when you would have been offering me everything I’d always wanted.”

He pressed both palms against his temples. “That makes no fucking sense.”

“We weren’t meant for forever. We both knew that. I was just the one who could admit it. You were always going to walk away. I just did it before you could.”

“I wasn’t going anywhere.”

---