Page 79 of Head Over Heels

“I can’t—I can’t stay. I can’t let you do what you’re saying. I can’t let you buy the store for me. You’d be claustrophobic—you said it yourself.”

He looks away. I’ve hit the target dead center.

He takes a breath, squares his shoulders, finds my gaze again. “So forget the part about the store. We’ll figure it out. You’ll find something. Just don’t go to Denver. Liv, I don’t want you to go.”

“You think that now.”

“Iknowthat now.”

“But you said yourself, being tied down terrifies you. We’re both that way, for our own reasons. You’d hate yourself for tying yourself to that place, and to me, and then in the end you’d hate me, too. And the thing is, Chase, I never want you to hate me.”

As I’m saying it, I know I’m right. It will be so hard to walk away from Katie and Chase now. But if I stick around and then it doesn’t work out, it will be so much harder. Because then I would be walking away from everything. A family. A job. A home. Belonging.

I can’t do it again.

“I wouldn’t. This is different. You’re different. To me.”

I shake my head. “Chase, I know you think it is, but people don’t change that much. They think they will, they think they want to, but they don’t. You’re the guy you are, and I don’twantyou to have to change that for me.”

Chase’s face has gone blank, like the stillness in the world after an ice storm.

The house is so quiet. The refrigerator humming. Rain begins to fall, gently, outside. I can hear my own heartbeat.

“No,” he says, at last. “You’re right. Peopledon’tchange. Not in the way you mean.”

They’re the words I wanted to hear, but as soon as they’re out of his mouth, I realize that I was hoping against hope that he’d say something else.

I’ll change. For you.

Stay, and I promise I will love you forever.

But that’s not what he said.

He doesn’t seem angry. Sad, maybe, like me. Because it’s been so good. Because if we were different people, in a different situation, this might be the answer.

As if he can read my mind, he says, “Are we still friends?”

“Ofcourse.We will always be friends.”

“And—”

I recognize the shift in his voice, in his breathing, and my body is so tuned to his now that it follows along, my pulse kicking up.

“—are there still benefits?”

I’m already breathless and wet, and he doesn’t wait for an answer before he crawls across the couch to make it so.

Chapter 42

Liv

The kissing is so tender. Like we’re kissing for the first time, or maybe like we’ve known each other for years and years and are so comfortable, one kiss flows into the next without awkwardness or trying. And his hands move gently in my hair, brushing it off my face, tugging handfuls, but not hard, just so my scalp tingles all over. And he keeps whispering my name, sometimes so quietly I’m not sure whether he means me to hear or not.

And when he carries me upstairs, he cradles me like something precious and looks into my eyes the whole time. It makes me want to cry, because I don’t think anyone has ever looked at me that way in my whole life. Not since—

Well, not since my mom, and I don’t really remember that.

He looks at me as though he sees exactly who I am and likes me exactly that way.

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