Page 22 of Jessie's Girl
“India…”
“No,” I say again, shaking my head. I told myself I was coming over here just to speak, so the cold front that stretched from the table to the bar didn’t leave me with frost bite. To show him and myself that I’m over him, that he no longer possesses any power of me or my feelings. Not to crawl through my past with this man, to resurrect old shit. But the words churn inside me, gaining speed and strength, and they break free like swollen rapids contained behind a steadily splintering dam. Words I didn’t get to say because I’d left this town and him in the dead of night. “The game wasn’t engaged to me. The game didn’t promise to love me, to stay faithful to me. The game wasn’t my best friend, my lover, my everything.Youwere.”
Pain slashes across his handsome face, and an instinctive apology dances on my tongue. Deliberately hurting him is not my aim, and the part of myself that still recognizes him as the man who once held my heart yearns to comfort him. But I lock that half down.
“I didn’t come over here to rehash our history. Or to throw blame in your face, Jessie. And honestly, I don’t hate you anymore. I let go of that a while ago. For myself. Because I couldn’t start a new life still holding on to the old one.”
“You mean still holding on to me,” he adds, a strain of bitterness threading through his voice.
“Yes.” There’s no point in denying it.
“And what if I wanted you to hold onto me? To us?” he demanded, leaning toward me, that same intensity that used to radiate from him when he played football pinned on me. Who am I kidding? That intensity had been for me, too. As much as I preferred to forget it, when we were together, I used to be on the receiving end of all his focus. And I’d loved it. A faint echo of how much I’d loved it rippled through me now. But not strong enough to make me fall back into the lovely black hole that had been Jessie Reynolds. “You never gave me a chance to make it right. To fix us. One mistake. One, out of the four years we were together. I deserved the chance, baby.”
“You deserved what I needed to fight my way through to the other side of being good again. To survive the pain the heartbreak. And what I needed was time and space. Without you. It ceased being about you, what you wanted when your side-chick messaged me. Dammit,” I bite out. Closing my eyes, I sink my teeth into my bottom lip and turn away. “Jess, I don’t want to do this, okay? Not now and not here.”
Not ever.
I slide off the bar stool, but his hand shoots out, gently wrapping around my wrist. I glance down, again waiting for that… something. The desire that used to stir in me for him. The love that used to bind me to him. But again… nothing. I imagined this day and had always wondered if that adoration would swell in my chest, would make me a slave to my emotions.
But no. I’m free.
And I’m both relieved and strangely, sad.
“India, please,” he whispers. “You said you don’t hate me. Maybe we can start there.” His green gaze searches my face, touches on my eyes, lips, chin then back to my eyes. “I’m so incredibly sorry I hurt you, baby. I’ve never forgiven myself for it. And I’ve never stopping thinking about you, wondering where you were, if you were all right. India, maybe I don’t deserve it, but I’m still asking. Us being here tonight…” He shakes his head. “I refuse to believe it was a mistake. Please, give me a chance to do what I couldn’t two years ago. Make things right between us. What we had—you can’t convince me you don’t feel anything for me. Not after who we were to each other.”
There’d been moments after I left Pike’s End that I would’ve caved and gone back to him if he’d appeared on my friend’s apartment doorstep and uttered these same words to me. Just to stop the pain. But I’m not that woman anymore. I’ve crawled through to the other side, and the truth is, I’m scared. Scared to trust, to be vulnerable and dependent on another person again.
Especially one who’s already betrayed me.
“Who wewere, Jessie,” I murmur, gently twisting my arm to extricate my wrist from his grip. “There is no going back. I’ve moved on. You should, too.”
I turn and walk back to the table with Lena, her cousin and brother. What started as a fun night has soured, and it sits on my stomach like curdled milk.
“You okay?” Lena asks, as soon as I sink down onto the chair, her hazel eyes concerned behind her blue-rimmed glasses.
“Yeah, I’m…”
Movement snags my attention out the corner of my eye. Asa pushes off the far wall, and even though he’s half-enshrouded in shadows, Ifeelhis gaze on me like a heavy palm. Over my face, my throat, my suddenly tingling breasts, and lower, to my achingly empty pussy. That quick, he lights a fire in me that only he can extinguish, but he refuses to do it.
And after talking with Jessie for the first time in two years, I understand why.
I do. But it still doesn’t change the stark truth that crouches between us, rattling like an agitated snake.
The man I want won’t allow himself to have me because I’m Jessie’s girl. In his eyes, I always will be.
“I’m fine.”
6
India
When the doorbell echoes inside my cozy, rented bungalow several hours later, I’m not surprised. Still, my feet don’t move forward. Instead, I stare at the door, picturing the man on the other side. The broad shoulders, the wide chest that probably spans the width of the frame. The big hands that once palmed footballs and held me just as easily. The thick trunks of his thighs that had strained against denim as he’d pushed himself from the bar stool. The frown that, at times, seemed to be surgically implanted on his face.
God, that frown.
It did things to me.
Made me fantasize about if he’d wear it while sliding inside of me for the first time. If it’d etch his forehead while he came…
