“We’re not broken up, are we?” It wasn’t until she’d said the words that she realized how much it revealed the little trust she had in them. Us.
She turned her head to look at him while he answered and was surprised to see a look in his eyes that she could only describe as pure fear. He might be trying to hide it, but he held himself so stiffly that she thought he’d shatter if she tapped his shoulder.
But he held himself together, taking a deep breath. “Honestly, I don’t know where we stand.”
Horror made her suck in her breath so quickly that she coughed. “What does that mean?”
“When you told me about your illness, I thought the worst thing in the world would be caring about someone as they suffered through something I couldn’t fix. Worry combined with caring and fear and... Just because I wouldn’t go back and change any of my life with Kimmie doesn’t mean I want to go through that again.”
His hand gripped the edge of the couch, tightening around the cushion so that his knuckles turned white. “But we might not even make it there because you can’t decide if you trust me enough to talk about feeling tired. I could learn not to pile all my worry on top of you, but not if I never know if you’re hiding something from me.”
Mina wrapped her hands around her torso, this time trying to keep herself from splintering. “That wasn’t what I meant by this at all. I just didn’t want you to worry.”
Worry smothered, and she needed to breathe.
“I know. But you’ve got to give me a chance. You’ve got to give this whole thing a chance.”
“So what does ‘I don’t know’ mean?” she asked again. “Do I get a second chance?”
She needed all the help she could get figuring out solid relationships. God, she was twenty-seven years old. She should know more about what it meant to be in love and to be settled with someone than she did.
She’d dated. She’d even been in love, but she’d always been too busy thinking about what would happen to her relationship when she graduated and went on the academic job market, she probably hadn’t put much effort into any of those relationships. Maybe she’d let them fizzle out before their time. Inertia, or lack of it.
Or the fates were giving her a chance to grow and meet Levi. Now she needed them to give her the opportunity to make this right.
“I need to think about how long I can stay with someone who has to think about how much faith they have in a relationship with me,” he said bluntly. “I’m honestly not sure what the answer is.”
“Are we broken up?” she asked again.
“No. But I’m thinking. And you should think, too. After we get through Thanksgiving, maybe we should spend that time thinking in our own houses and our own beds.”
She blinked away the tears that came into her eyes at the thought of this relationship ending, while she repeated We’re not over again and again in her head, as if that phrase were a lifeline she could cling to.
“I don’t need to be apart from you to think,” she said, her voice cracking over the words.
“I need to be apart from you.” With that blunt pronouncement, he stood and looked ready to walk out on her. Then he seemed to think better of it, stopping to put his hand on her head. She fell against him, wrapping her arms around him, pressing her lips into his torso and trying to store as much of his scent into her memory as possible.
With a quick kiss to the top of her head, he was off. The door shutting quietly behind him snapped her composure completely. She made it to her bedroom before she burst into tears. He said they weren’t over, but that wasn’t even what she was crying about. This was hard, harder than she’d thought love would be. She’d messed up, and that was hard, too.
But she wanted him to come back so that they could keep working on us. Just because it was hard didn’t mean that she wanted to quit.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
LEVI’S FOOTSTEPS ACROSS their two lawns felt as heavy as his heart did. He loved Mina. He didn’t doubt that. And he was a relationship kind of guy, which meant that love came with a desire to settle down. Marry. Have kids, if that was what they both wanted.