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“What are you doing here?” I whisper. “Haven’t I made it clear that I don’t want to talk to you?”
I don’t even notice the massive bunch of roses in his hands until he passes them over to me. I almost don’t want to take them, but I feel like I have an audience watching me and I don’t want to make this more of a scene than it already is. It’s already embarrassing enough. All of my life is at the moment.
“Please, Gemma, all I want to do is make this right.” There is such a pleading in his gaze that it nearly takes me down. I’m not going to easily forgive him, but this definitely isn’t as straight forward as it should be. “I want to show you how much you mean to me. I want to let you see that I didn’t do this to you, that I wouldn’t do it to us. I respect you too much for that, I care about you too much, I would never want to harm you.”
“You hate me,” I hiss back. “You always have done. Ever since I stole that first account from you. You have never had any respect for me either so I don’t see how you can suddenly act like you do right now.”
He steps closer to me, nearly reaching out to touch me but I refuse to let that happen. Not a chance in hell. “I might have been an asshole in the past and not treated you or other people with respect, but the more time that I have spent with you, the deeper I have fallen. I like you; I have surprised myself with how much I like you.”
I can’t listen to this. It’s terrifying and overwhelming. I need to escape him because he’s confusing me, mixing up my brain, making me feel sick to my stomach. The thing is he is giving me all the words that I could possibly need to jump in to this with both feet but I’m too terrified to do so. I can’t make that step. I don’t know if Daniel actually expects me to take that step like this… but there is also the intense sense that this is our last chance. If we don’t do this now, then the opportunity will slip through our fingers and we will lose it forever.
“Daniel, this is too intense,” I rasp out. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I want you to give me a chance. I want you to see that this could be something amazing. I want you to forget about all the shitty Internet stuff and try once more. I mean when you really think about it, we had something great, didn’t we? I don’t know about you, but I haven’t ever felt anything like that before. No one has ever sparked such desire inside of me. Sure, you aren’t the person who I thought I would fall for because you are right, we didn’t get on before, did we? But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t right. These sorts of things can come from the strangest of places. For me and you it came from the unexpected charity date.”
My knees are weak and shaking, my whole body trembling, my head is scrambled. I almost want to fall in to Daniel’s arms to agree with him and let him know that I felt some unexpected things as well. I want to let him know that he isn’t alone with his emotions, but there is something silencing me, something blocking me, making it impossible for me to make any kind of sound. I don’t know what is being expected of me here.
Being in the bubble with Daniel once more gives me a moment to think. I stare in to his eyes and lose myself in the love swimming there, knowing that it could be incredible if I let it. If I just got over my moment of fear and let this happen then it could be the best choice that I ever make. It could be amazing…
But then the journalist drags me back in to the present moment with his camera flash flickering to life. All of a sudden, I see this scene through his eyes, and I realize just what Daniel is doing here. He’s come to my work with a bunch of roses and earnest looking promises of love forever to make himself seem like the good guy here. Since this is affecting him as well, he doesn’t want to look like the bad, one-night stand guy, he wants to seem like the hopeless romantic who is just looking for ‘the one’ and he doesn’t care about throwing me under the bus to make that image come true. He knows that people think of me as icy anyway and he knows that the inevitable rejection will look that way and only tarnish me further. He is being clever and manipulative all over again.
