Page 136 of The Proposal Pact
“No, no, no. I can’t leave. I can’t leave until time goes back.”
My heart races, fear like I haven’t known before trying to seize it.
She wants to erase the time we spent together.
She wants to erase…us.
“Little menace, it won’t go back.” I swallowed hard, my chest heaving.
Did she meet someone else? Has she fallen in love with another man? Am I about to lose her?
“No! I need it to go back!” She stops and stomps her foot in the water, and I catch sight of those white Converse that I was making for her on her feet.
“Why?” I grit my teeth, my hand still extended toward her as if frozen in place.
Just like my heart right now.
“Because I love you!” Sophie shouts and everything around me ceases to exist. The people around us. The town. The ocean. The cold wind. Everything. “I love you so damn much, Callum Clover Lovinski, and you’ll never love me back.”
“Oh?” The hand that was reaching out toward her drops.
Fuck…I did fuck up, didn’t I?
“Yeah,oh. I’m drunk and looking for a time machine because you won’t love me because there’s no room in your heart for me. There never was from the very beginning.”
I blink, all the pieces falling together, why it felt different last night.
“You’re right. There wasn’t.”
She stops, those beautiful eyes filled with so much hurt it nearly breaks me. And when I see a lone tear slip down her face, mingling with the drops of water, I move, stepping over the edge, into the freezing water walking toward her because in no life will she cry because of me.
“Wh-what are you doing? You’re going to be all wet, I’ll just come out—” She stops talking when I close the distance between us, my hands are cupping her cold, tear-streaked face.
“Clover—” She wraps her hands around my wrists.
“You’re right. There wasn’t any room in my heart for you,” I tell her as I bend down, brushing my nose against hers and inhaling a lungful of her minty scent. The scent of home.
She tries to pull away from me.
“Well, I didn’t need to hear that again, Shrek. Way to stomp on a bleeding woun—”
I shut her up with a kiss as I chuckle when her arms flail around me.
“Just stop and listen for a second, woman. Can you do that for once?” I whisper against her lips. Sophie looks into my eyes and nods.
“There wasn’t any room, yet you still sneaked in. And being the obnoxious little menace that you are, you pushed around, you set a few old things on fire, and generally didn’t give a single fuck as you painted my cold dead heart in so much color, all I could think, see, feel was you.”
She gasps and I rub the tip of my nose against hers again. “I-I did?”
“You did,” I smile. “I love you, Sophie Lovinski. Can we please call off the search for the time machine?”
“But…but…your story! Your past—”
“Is still there. And always will be. But you’re my present and all my futures.”
“So, I’m not just a Band-Aid?”
I frown. “A Band-Aid? I don’t know what the fuck that means, but you’re not anything other than the only woman I’ve ever loved. Really loved. Not one I thought I did. Not assumed that that’s what that was, but actually fell head over heels, madly, deeply in love with the most chaotic, colorful woman who hates coral color, will kill for her hockey, can’t stop talking to save her life and knows every nineties hit out there.”
