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“Hey, nothing like that,” Blake said, reassuring me. “They just know we were in a group home together and haven’t seen each other in a really long time. Too long. Look, Penny. I have a confession to make…” He hesitated, and I tugged the zipper of my hoodie, suddenly feeling a chill despite the nervous energy coursing through me.
“I knew you were coming.”
The words landed like a bombshell, and I stopped dead, gawking at him. “What?” I asked, certain I must have heard him wrong. “What do you mean you knew I was coming?”
Guilt flashed across his expression. “I stay in touch with Tina and Troy throughout the year. When Troy had his operation back in the spring, Tina asked me to step in and help her vet the applications. I saw your name and read your application. I knew instantly it was you.”
He knew.
Blake knew I was coming here yet he’d acted as surprised to see me that first night as I was to see him.
As if he could hear my thoughts, Blake went on. “I saw you across the fire Penny and it was like I’d been sucker-punched. I guess I wasn’t as prepared to see you as I thought.”
Well, that explained some of his shock, but it still didn’t make me feel any better that, all this time, he knew.
He started to walk again, but when I didn’t follow, he backtracked. “Shit, Penny,” he sighed. “I know there’s a lot we still haven’t talked about, but just give me a chance. Please.”
We hadn’t talked at all.
We had been polite and skirted around one another, and then tonight, there had been the moment across the fire, but we had yet to say any of the things we needed to say.
For a long time after Blake left the Freeman group home, I imagined what I would say if I ever saw him again. I wanted answers.
Where did he go?
How could he leave me behind?
Derek and Marie refused to tell me anything; they said it was confidential. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Amy took great pleasure in taunting me. She said I was too clingy. Said that Blake had requested the move to get away from me.
I knew that wasn’t true; Blake loved me.
He’d told me right before my seventeenth birthday, a few days before I came home to find him gone. But Amy did have a point because he was gone, and I was still there wondering what in the hell had happened.
That question haunted me for a very long time. But now he was here, standing next to me, asking—no, pleading—for a chance to explain.
And I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear the answers.
“Penny…” His voice cracked, and he swallowed nervously.
The emotion in his voice sparked something inside me, but all I could do was nod.
There was never a choice to make, not where Blake Weston was concerned. My head might have learned to hate him. To blame him. But my heart never forgot him. Never forgot the love it once felt for him.
Stillfelt for him.
Oh god, this was a bad idea.
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Blake. It’s been so long and it took me a really long time to get over what happened.”
Not that I’d ever really gotten over it.
“Just give me a chance to explain, that’s all I’m asking,” he said.
“I… fine, okay.”
Relief flashed in his eyes as ran a hand over his jaw.
But I didn’t feel relieved, not even a little bit.
