It does.
It absolutely does. But beneath the fear, rising through it like something that has been waiting a long time to reach the surface, something else arrives.
Anger.
Not at Zane this time. But at myself. At every version of me that decided that wanting less would hurt less. That choosing the safe and reasonable would make my life easier.
For fuck’s sake, I’ve been too small for too long and have never taken what I really wanted.
I stare through the windshield at the road ahead. Then I flick on the turn signal.
“You are being stupid,” I mutter to the version of me who spent all these years being sensible and ended up with nothing to show for it but a four-dollar cactus. “Reckless. But I don’t fucking care.”
I turn the car around.
My heart pounds harder with every street I retrace, every block bringing me back to where I have just come from.
By the time Rainer’s workshop comes back into view, I am half furious, half terrified, and entirely, completely out of my fucking mind.
Zane is exactly where I left him, standing in the open doorway of the workshop with the amber light at his back.
When I pull up, his body goes still.
I park crooked, at an angle that would give Cassie enough material to roast me for three solid weeks if she ever saw it, and I don’t care.
I get out and slam the door.
Zane doesn’t move. His eyes lock onto me the moment I appear, and they stay there, tracking me across the concrete.
The closer I get, the angrier I become.
He stands there, and all I want is to climb him, hit him, cry into his chest, and tell him he is still the biggest asshole I have ever met.
I stop in front of him.
“You,” I say, pointing directly at his chest, “are still the most emotionally constipated, self-sacrificing, cocky, martyr-complex-having asshole I have ever met in my life.”
For one full second, he only stares at me.
Then his mouth curves slowly. Dangerous in that specific way it has always been. That crooked smirk that I have spent the better part of a decade wanting to slap off his face and then kiss back onto it in the same breath.
My whole body lights up as if he flicked a switch.
God. I hate him.
My thighs tighten without my permission. Traitorous, treacherous body.
The smirk deepens because he sees it. Never once in my life have I managed to hide anything from this man, no matter how hard I try.
I reach out and take his hand before I can talk myself out of it. Before the sensible part of me, still somewhere back down the road, can catch up and intervene.
“I can be mad at you tomorrow,” I say.
“Sky.” His voice is low and careful.
“No.” I start walking, pulling him with me through the roller door and into the workshop. “Do not ruin this with your prison-guilt bullshit, or I swear to God I will change my mind purely out of spite, and we will both be miserable.”
A rough laugh bursts out of him. Low and entirely unguarded. It hits me somewhere low, warm, and deeply inconvenient.
