His expression hardened. “Leave?”
“Yes,” I said, my voice cutting through the hallway now. “Leave this city. Leave my university. Leave my life. Leave me.”
Hayden stepped toward me, and I moved back at once.
“Leave me the fuck alone.”
“Edwina—”
“No,” I cut him off, anger burning too hot to contain. “Stop saying my name. Don’t touch me. Don’t corner me in hallways and act as if you can walk back into my life and claim something you threw away years ago.” His jaw tightened.
“Just go,” I said, my voice rising. “Return to whatever life you built with your fiancée. Leave for Washington. Crawl back into whatever lie you came from and stop dragging me into your mess again.”
“I’m not married.”
His words cut through mine, and for a second, I couldn’t breathe.
For a moment, the hallway seemed to stop around us. “What?” I whispered.
Hayden’s voice lowered, though nothing in it wavered. “I said I’m not married.”
I stared at him, trying to make the words fit into everything I had believed for years. “How is that possible?”
“It is.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head as anger and disbelief rose together. “No, you’re lying again.”
His jaw tightened.
“I’m not.”
“But…”
“I broke it off,” he said. “Years ago.”
The answer should have brought relief. Some part of me had waited so long to hear it that I almost hated myself for how deeply it struck. Instead, it opened something more painful, something I did not know what to do with, because if Hayden Stone had never married her, then the anger I had carried for years no longer stood on the same ground.
The accusation stayed between us, unfinished and suddenly uncertain, while the hallway seemed too narrow for everything we had never said.
I forced myself to speak again, because if I stayed silent any longer, the confusion would swallow everything I had spent years holding onto.
“But it doesn’t change anything,” I said, my voice firmer than I felt. “You still lied to me.”
His jaw tightened.
“And that doesn’t go away because you broke off the engagement later.”
The anger came back slowly, pushing through the shock his confession had left behind. I held on to it because anger made more sense than pain, because anger gave me somewhere to stand.
“You hid things from me,” I said, the words gaining force as the memories returned. “Your fiancée. The job offer. You hid an entire future from me and acted like it had nothing to do with the woman you were sharing your life with.”
I stopped before the last word could leave my mouth. Because his hand was suddenly on my wrist again. And then his mouth was on mine. It happened so fast my mind had no time to protect me from it. His lips pressed against mine with too much force, too much frustration, too much of everything we had failed to say, and for one stunned heartbeat, I froze.
He pulled back to speak against my mouth.
“You talk too much,” he said, his voice rough. “And this is the only way I know how to shut you up.”
Then he kissed me again. The world around us fell away. The music from the reception faded behind the walls, the hallway disappeared, and all I could feel was the heat of his mouth, the grip around my wrist, and the terrible familiarity of something I had spent years trying to survive forgetting.
