Page 10 of Say You Love Me

Her arms drop to her sides. Her smile fades. Her gaze becomes hesitant. “Morning.”

I swallow the longing for our life of before and stride past the bed toward the bathroom. “Morning.”

“Where have you been?”

I pretend not to hear and shut the door, pressing my head against the wood. Having her home again is harder than I thought it would be. I thought it would be easy to keep my resolve. Easy to keep hating her.

But it’s not.

She’s gone when I come out of the bathroom. The bed has been made. My clothes have been picked up, folded and neatly placed on top of the dresser. But her bag still sits at the side of the door, unopened, clothes still neatly tucked inside.

She and my mother are in the kitchen when I come downstairs. Mum smiles brightly and gives me a nod of approval.

“You always look so dashing in a suit.” She walks over and adjusts my tie, twisting it a little before patting my chest. “Don’t you think he looks dashing, Finity?”

She nods and takes a sip of her coffee, her eyes flicking to mine briefly over the rim of the mug. I nod back, an unspoken language of awkwardness hanging between us.

“Do you want some breakfast?” Finity stretches her finger to where the kitchen bench is covered in muffins. My mother must have brought them. I shake my head. “I’m already late,” I lie. “I’ll just grab something on the way.”

I’m out the door and almost down the steps when Mum calls out to me. “Hudson?”

I stop at the hesitation in her voice and turn to face her. Her cardigan is wrapped tightly around her shoulders and she’s hugging herself against the sharpness of the cold.

“Be kind to her.”

We lock eyes and I see tears swimming in hers. But she doesn’t know the full story. She doesn’t know everything that happened.

chapter four

THEN

~

HUDSON

Each time I close my eyes I see her. Her hair hangs loose and wet. Drops of rain slide down her cheeks and one settles on her lip. I want to lick it away. I want to taste her. She blinks. Once. Twice. And then she walks away from me through the rain.

“Wait.” The word is ripped from my mouth.

She stops and looks behind her. Rain falls as a blanket. She walks back quickly and stands right in front of me. She blinks again, as though waiting for something. And then, without warning, she lifts to her tiptoes and presses a kiss to my mouth. It isn’t an innocent kiss. It is a kiss fueled with unexplored passion that is over as quickly as it starts. Then she dashes off into the darkness and the rain and I am left with the knowledge that I just fell in love with a girl I hardly know.

And that’s how she left me, with nothing but her name.

My parents and I stayed at the lake house for the rest of the week and each day I wandered about aimlessly, trying to catch a glimpse of her. But I never found her. I thought I would forget her when I came back to the city, but I didn’t. She kept haunting me.

You would think that finding someone called Finity would be an easy thing, but it’s not. She has no profiles on social media. There is no number listed in her name. None of my friends have heard of her.

It’s been a month since she came into my world. A month of thinking about her, dreaming about her, a month of desperately trying to find her.

“Just give up,” Liam says. He holds an iced coffee in his hand and takes a long sip on the straw, drawing annoyed looks from the rest of the customers as he slurps loudly.

“But she’s the one,” I protest.

Liam laughs. “How can you possibly know that? You were with her for a few hours.”

He’s right. All logical sense says he’s right, but it hasn’t stopped her from haunting my dreams. It hasn’t stopped her smile from flashing across my mind each time I close my eyes. It hasn’t stopped those last few seconds of being with her running through my head on repeat.

The memory of her kiss burns even now.

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