Page 103 of Writing Mr. Wrong

“Everything was about getting into the NHL, and I’d never expect a girl to help me with that, so…” He shrugged. “No girlfriends. Just… you know.”

“Hookups.”

“I wanted more with you, but I’d never expect all the focus to be on me. You had your own goals.”

“Then you found out what your friends were saying…”

“And I was furious. I told them it wasn’t a dare, and they were being assholes, and stop that shit. They promised they would. Butit was too late, and I knew I needed to say something. It took all day for me to work up the nerve, and when I did…”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “I don’t know what I wanted from that conversation, Gem. I really don’t. When you said it was no big deal… I’m not gonna lie. That hurt. But I also—” He swallowed. “I leapt on it, too. You didn’t feel the same way I did, and that stung, but also… I was relieved.”

There it was. The true confession. That he wasn’t just an asshole. He was also a coward.

He kept going. “I knew it wouldn’t work, and I didn’t have the guts to say that. I wanted you, and when I realized I couldn’t have you, I felt like a little kid, stamping my feet and saying it wasn’t fair. I was Mason Moretti. I should get what I want. But if you didn’t want me back, then that was…”

“The perfect solution,” she murmured.

“I didn’t really understand it all until now. I remember this jumble of feelings, and I got caught up in all that, and when it ended, you were gone, and I felt… I felt a lot of things, but mostly I felt like an asshole, and I hated that, so I told myself you were better off, and maybe you were, but that wasn’t my decision to make.”

Silence. Then she whispered, “It really wasn’t.”

He nodded, his insides clenching, as if he’d hoped for another response, one that told him he’d done the right thing. Except he hadn’t.

“I…” Gemma took a deep breath. “I won’t say you were wrong about us. Itwouldn’thave worked. We could have tried, and maybe that would have hurt even more, in the long run. Or you could have said you’d made a mistake, and that would also have hurt. The problem was how you did it.”

“You trusted me, and I betrayed that. I didn’t have the guts to say it wouldn’t work. I didn’t trust that you’d have seen that yourself. I just let that tide roll over us and make the decisions for me.”

She pulled her legs up under her. “I appreciate that, however it came about, you didn’t expect me to be that kind of girlfriend. I could say that I wouldn’t have stood for it, but that’d be a lovely bit of self-delusion because Ididstand for it, with my ex. He needed the kind of wife who put his career first and worked in service of that. The fact that you knew, even then, that that was wrong for me…” She looked up at him. “Thank you.”

He let the silence fall. Then he said, “If you want to leave, I won’t stop you. I’d like to go along, if that’s okay.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to leave.” Her gaze rose to his again. “Unless you’d like me to.”

He met her gaze and felt his heart clench. “I never wanted you to go, Gem. That was the problem.”

She stood and walked over to him. When he hesitated, she said, “May I?” and gestured at his lap. He nodded mutely and put out his arms, and she straddled his lap, her hands lacing behind his neck. Then she kissed him.

GEMMA

As Gemma kissed Mason, her hands dropped to the hem of his tank top. She tugged the shirt over his head and dropped it to the side. Then she ran her fingers down his chest and over his abdomen as she traced the muscles there.

“I had to take off your shirt that night I stayed over,” she said, herattention still on tracing those muscles. “Camille had spilled wine on it and it was drenched, and it was really wrong to make you sleep that way,” she said. “I had a good reason, but it felt like an excuse. I just really wanted to take your shirt off.”

He chuckled, the sound vibrating under her fingers.

“So I did take it off, as you may have noticed,” she said. “Which was a mistake.”

“A mistake?”

“Once I looked, I wanted to touch. I’ve spent the last few days wanting to touch. And you know what?” She leaned to his ear. “It was worth the wait.”

She only smiled and resumed her exploration, letting her fingers run over his biceps.

“Want to hear another dirty little secret?” she said.

“Absolutely.”

She leaned to his ear again. “When I had a bath in your apartment, I left the door unlocked.” She pulled back to run her fingers over his chest again. “Couldn’t quite bring myself to leave it open. But it was definitely unlocked. Just in case.”

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