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“Sure thing, Mr. Frost.” Jorge all but salutes before turning toward me. “Have a good night, Ms. Girard.”
Somehow I manage to unglue my tongue from the roof of my mouth long enough to mutter, “You, too.”
And then he’s gone, walking back along the path to the building and I’m left alone with Ethan, whose mood I can’t begin to gauge. He seems calm enough, but there’s a fierceness in his eyes—a determination—that makes me wary even as it gets my heart beating triple time. His black eye and bruised jaw only reinforce the danger rolling off him in waves.
“I called you,” he says as he stops right in front of me. He’s not crowding me, not really, but he isn’t giving me any wiggle room, either. He’s close enough that I can feel the heat radiating from his long, lean body, more than close enough for me to breathe in the dark, musky scent of him with each inhalation that I take. “You didn’t answer.”
“My phone was off.” It doesn’t occur to me to lie as I force the words out of my too-tight throat. I know I sound stilted and awkward, but it’s the best I can manage at this point. “I haven’t checked my messages.”
He nods, his cerulean eyes blazing so brightly that I can’t help feeling the burn of them on my skin. In my blood.
I wait for him to say something else, but he doesn’t, and long moments pass while the two of us just stand there staring at each other. When I can’t take it anymore, when the tension between us threatens to snap like a rubber band stretched too far, I square my shoulders. Start breathing through my mouth. Pretend that being this close to him isn’t painful and arousing and terrifying all at the same time.
“Thank you for getting my car fixed.”
He nods, his face pained, but he still doesn’t say anything, which only makes my anxiety worse.
“Look, I need to go,” I tell him. “It’s been a long day and I’m hungry and exhausted—”
“Let me take you to dinner.”
“No.” The word is ripped from me before I even know I’m going to say it. No softness to cushion the blow, no polite excuses. Just the loud, irrevocable negative that can’t be mistaken for anything but the denial it is.
“Let me take you home, then. We can stop and get takeout—”
“No!” Again the denial is instinctive.
“Chloe, please—”
He reaches for me and I flinch back instinctively. He freezes, arms outstretched and face tormented. I know I’ve hurt him and I want to apologize, but I can’t bring myself to say the words. Not this time.
“Okay,” he says, dropping his hands to his sides. “We’ll talk here, then.”
“There’s nothing to talk about, Ethan.”
“There’s everything to talk about! I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Brandon. I’m sorry you had to find out the way you did. I’m sorry that he hurt you. I’m sorry, Chloe. About everything. I’m just so goddamned sorry.”
“I know,” I say, because I do. I was there two nights ago when he tried to end it between us and I was there yesterday morning when he nearly tore Brandon to shreds. “I’m not angry at you.”
“You should be. God knows I’m furious at myself.”
“You shouldn’t be. None of this is your fault.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do mean it. Absolutely.”
And I do. I’ve had over thirty-six hours to think about things, to try to figure out how it’s even possible that the only man I’ve ever trusted, the only man I’ve ever opened up to, is actually the brother of the man who nearly destroyed me all those years ago. I don’t have an answer as to how it happened, as to how fate could be so cruel. But I do know that it’s no one’s fault. That there were no warning signs or coincidences that Ethan and I turned a blind eye to.
In an effort to shed every trace of my old identity, I legally changed my last name as soon as I turned eighteen. There was no way for Ethan to know who I was when he first met me, any more than there was a way for me to know who he was. Brandon is his half-brother on his mother’s side. They might share the same colored eyes, but they don’t share much more than that. They definitely don’t share a last name.
Should he have told me about Brandon as soon as he found out? Absolutely.
Should he have slept with me two nights ago, knowing that our pasts were forever intertwined in the worst possible way? Absolutely not.
But he did try to break up with me when I went to see him that night. He did try to end it as painlessly as possible. I’m the one who went off the rails, the one who lost it because I couldn’t understand how the man I loved could have done such an abrupt about-face.
No, this mess we are in is no more Ethan’s fault than mine. He didn’t rape me and he didn’t try to cover it up afterward. Holding him responsible for that would make me no better than all those people who blamed me for speaking up about what Brandon did to me.
