Page 72 of Make Me Love You

She cocked her head. “Does that mean you forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive.”

“Fine. Does that mean you accept my apology, then?”

“Emma.” He looked at her, finally. “Of course I do.”

“Good. Because I love you.”

His expression changed, and she didn’t like it one bit. He didn’t look like a man who had just heard I love you and was going to say them back. No, he looked like a man gearing up to lecture a child on The Way Things Worked in the Real World.

“We had a deal,” he said kindly. Condescendingly. “Until the election, that’s it.”

She gritted her teeth. Of course he wasn’t going to make this easy. Because he was as big a coward as she was, only he hadn’t faced that yet.

“The deal was bullshit. You know that. I know that. It’s a stupid excuse. I don’t care that we made some agreement, because that’s what we had to tell ourselves to allow us to do what we wanted to do. It was fake. I’m over pretending things to myself, the good and the bad. I love you, and I want to be with you.”

“Right now you want to be with me. You only just now decided to heal a wound that’s been festering for eight years. What makes you think tomorrow it won’t open up again? What makes you think that tomorrow you won’t hate me?”

“Because I love you.” Her eyes burned, and she blinked rapidly. Dammit, she wasn’t going to cry. “Because you could stack all the hate I felt in those eight years and it wouldn’t hold a candle to all the love I feel for you in one millisecond. It’s a love worth facing my demons for. I would face a million more, if it meant being with you.”

“I don’t feel that way.”

All the breath left her in a gasp. It felt like being punched in the chest with a brick. “You don’t...you don’t love me?”

His jaw shifted and clenched, and she could tell he was struggling to find the right words. He never lied, but he had always said what she needed to hear. And when what she needed to hear wasn’t exactly the truth, he left a lot more unsaid.

She wondered, now, what he was going to leave unsaid. Because whatever next came out of his mouth, it wasn’t going to be the whole truth.

“There are lots of ways of loving, and of course I feel some of those ways for you,” he said. “But this...what you’re asking for...that’s not what this is. It’s not what we are. I can’t do this with you.”

“With me,” she repeated. So specific. Her heart was cracking open. She couldn’t breathe for pain.

“It’s better this way. You’ll see.”

She stood there, frozen, as he turned away and walked down the steps. Kept going down the sidewalk, farther away from her with each step, until he got into his truck. She kept thinking he would stop, that he would come back, that he would realize this was a mistake somehow.

But he didn’t. He drove away instead.

Grief poured through her. She was familiar with the feeling, but that was no comfort. She was tired of grieving the people she loved. Her mother. Her father. Eli.

It wasn’t better this way.

She didn’t think it could ever be better again.

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