Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
Right?
Chapter Twenty-Two
A SMART GIRL WOULD have quit at the first cold morning. But a smart girl also knows the difference between a man who doesn't want you and a man who wants you so badly he's gone to war with himself over it, and I'd bet my last dollar my Maximo is the second kind.
So...when a week goes by, and things still don't feel right between us...
A cheap trick it is.
"I have a reshoot," I tell him, planting myself in the kitchen where he can't leave without going through me. "The kiss scene. They want it again next week, and I'm rusty, and I need—" I make myself hold his eyes and not blink. "A lesson."
For a second I'm sure he'll say no.
For a second I'd almost rather he did.
Then something in all that cold gives, one hairline crack, and he sets his glass down without a sound, and his voice comes out rough and quiet and done fighting.
"One."
He kisses me like a man breaking a fast he swore he'd keep.
There's no lesson in it, no counting, no careful distance, and I stop pretending there ever was. My back finds the counter. His hands find my waist and then they don't stay there, they map me like he's memorizing something he's about to lose, and I'm pulling him closer by the shirt and he's letting me and the whole cold week burns off in the space of a single breath—
Then he freezes.
I feel it happen. I feel the exact instant the man comes back into his own body and sees where his hands are and hates it, and he tears himself off me and backward, breathing hard, three feet of kitchen and two years of grief slammed back down between us.
His gaze collides with mine, and I just...
"I don't have a reshoot," I choke out. I can't do it anymore. I can't bear to keep pretending everything's okay, and—
"I know."
Apparently, I never had to in the first place.
"It's late. You should go to bed."
So why then?
I can feel my borrowed heart breaking as I watch him leave without looking back. He just walks away like he's fine about me not being fine, and if I have a problem with that, I can just go, and he'd be fine with that, too.
Chapter Twenty-Three
THE NEXT NIGHT I STOP lying to both of us.
He's in the study because he's always in the study now, hiding behind a desk from a girl who couldn't hurt him if she spent a year trying.
Which is a thing I never once thought I'd see. My Maximo, the man nothing rattles, who runs a life the size of a country without blinking, rearranging his whole world so he never has to stand in a room with me.
I knock on the open door. He doesn't tell me to come in, but he doesn't tell me to go either so I take the opening and come in. I wait until he looks in my direction, and then I just blurt it all out.
"I don't need kissing lessons anymore."
The words have him stiffening, and I feel so pathetic when I realize I'm grateful even for that. He has me so confused, and so messed up, that I'm starting to lose sight of who I was before him.
"And I...I've decided that I need to stop lying and pretending. One of us should be brave enough to...to say the truth, and so—"
A muscle starts ticking in his jaw.
"I love you, Maximo."
My voice starts wobbling when all he does is look at me.
"I love you." I repeat it in hopes that he'll say something, but the silence just goes on like a song so awful you don't think you'll ever forget it.
"P-Please, Maximo—"
"If that's all you have to say..." He nods towards the door. "I've work to do."
Chapter Twenty-Four
THAT NIGHT, FOR THE first time in two years, Maximo unlocked the east-hall door and went in.
The room received him the way it always had, without a sound, exactly as he'd left it. The made bed, the hoodie on the chair, the little crowd of photographs he'd dusted himself every week because he couldn't bear to let a stranger do it. He sat on the edge of the bed that nobody slept in, and he didn't turn on a lamp. He knew the room by heart; he had built it that way on purpose, a place time wasn't allowed to touch.
He'd come in here to remember why.
Why the rules. Why the walls. Why he'd spent a week turning a warm, loud, impossible girl back into a stranger, one cold morning at a time. He had come to stand in the wreckage of his sister and let it remind him what he owed, and what he had almost thrown it away for.
The girl was forbidden, and she had been forbidden from the first night, on two counts he had no way to argue down. She was a lifetime too young for him, and the heart that kept her alive had once been his to bury. He had let himself forget both, for a week, and this was the price of remembering.