Page 149 of Haunt Me

She looks straight into my eyes and my breath stops. Naked, raw need is written all over her face. Pure Desire. Purewant.

“Not want you,” she says breathlessly.

“Want me then.” I nearly scream it. “Want me. Youhaveme.”

“But I don’t haveme,” she nearly screams in reply. “It’s… it’s going to be ugly.” I am shaking my head, laughing bitterly.Don’t talk to me about ugly, I think. “I can’t go through the pain of ending something again, and I will have to, because I’m not in a good place.” I shiver. That sounded so logical, so Eden-like, that I know it’s final. Her mind is made up. “Besides,” she continues in a calm voice, “there is nothing to end if we don’t begin anything. So let’s just not begin.”

No. It’s already begun. Can’t she see it?

Or maybe she can, but she can’t handle it. Not now. Not ever.

Complete panic grips me, fear like nothing I have ever known. The universe drops out from underneath my feet at the thought that there just might be too much trauma between us for it ever to work.

I won’t allow this. I’ll… I’ll make us happen, by sheer force of will.

It’s stupid, but it’s all I have right now.

“Just…” My lips have gone bloodless and it’s hard to move them. The same lips that were on fire for her just minutes ago. “Let me have some hope. Let me come back and date you when you are ready. Let me try, please, let me fight—” my breath catches.

“That wouldn’t be fair to you,” she says. I know she said we should be reasonable, but, dammit, no. Not if it means this. “You have to focus on your tour, after all.”

“Forget all about the tour.”

“You don’t mean that.”

Don’t I? Right now I would set my whole life on fire if the glow would warm her a little. Help heal her. She gathers her hands to her chest, her fingers twisted white. She is in pain. And the longer I stay here, the worse it’s going to get.

“I-I have to go,” I say in a voice I don’t recognize.

I guess that’s how she must have felt back then. Frozen in place. Small. Powerless. Detached.

I remember the day she broke up with me, how she looked. Her face… it wasn’t her face. It belonged to someone else. Now I guess I will never know what had happened between Solomon and her that led to that scene between us—it will be too triggering for her to tell me. Not that I need to know; I probably couldn’t bear it anyway.

But now I have an idea of how she must have felt.

…

James is waiting for me in a car two blocks down the street. I gape when I see him, and he stares at me over his sunglasses.

“You falling apart yet?” he asks me.

Has he been here this whole time? All these hours?

“Why did you stay?” I ask. I’m surprised my voice comes out normal. Ish.

He opens the door and comes over to stand next to me. “Mom went home, but I couldn’t leave you here,” he says. “Then Eden… she told me to wait for you. That you wouldn’t be staying.”

A chill works its way down my spine.

She knew. She had decided she would send me away. That we shouldn’t ‘begin’ anything. I thought my coming here was the start of something new, but she just wanted to say goodbye. That was all.

“Come on.” James is talking to me with so much kindness it freaks me out.

He starts to wrap his hand around my shoulders, to guide me into the car as if I’m a kid, and I shake his hand off impatiently.

With rage.

He chuckles. “You’ll be ok,” he says.

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