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“Chloe, please,” he says in the husky voice that has sent shivers down my spine from the first time I heard it all those weeks ago.
“No,” I tell him, pulling the offending chain from around my waist with a definite air of determination. It makes me sad in a way I’m not expecting. After everything that’s happened between us, after everything he’s given me, I never thought I’d be able to deny Ethan anything. But for both our sakes, I have to deny him this.
“I can’t be with you, Ethan. I can’t. It will ruin me. Undeniably. Irrevocably. Being with you now will destroy me in a way that Brandon didn’t come close to.”
“You don’t know that,” he tells me even as the light dies in his eyes. His beautiful blue eyes that suddenly look so much like the ones in my nightmares. The ones that have haunted me for five long years.
“I do know it.”
“How?” he demands, and for once he sounds as impatient and confused and hurt as I do. “How can you be so sure without even trying?”
“Because,” I tell him, my voice breaking on the truth I can’t hold back any longer, the truth I never wanted to say out loud—for either of our sakes. “Because now, when I look in your eyes, all I see is him.”
Ethan reels back like I’ve struck him and I want to take the words back, I do. But I can’t, because they are my deep, dark truth. They are the insurmountable obstacle standing between us, and they always will be.
“I have to go,” I tell him, fumbling my car door open and climbing inside.
This time he doesn’t try to stop me.
Chapter Six
“That’s it! I can’t take it anymore!” Tori says, making an abrupt right turn into the parking lot of University Towne Center.
“Take what
?” I ask, absently staring out the window at the passing traffic. UTC is one of the biggest and busiest malls in San Diego and it’s also Tori’s personal nirvana. Well, next to Paris and Rodeo Drive, that is.
“The moping! Always with the moping.” She brings the car to a stop at the valet parking stand, then all but drags me from the passenger seat. “You’ve been miserable for two weeks and I can’t take it anymore.”
She’s not wrong—I have been miserable for the last two weeks, ever since I left Ethan standing in the parking lot at work, tears in his eyes and his heart on his sleeve. But I can feel myself getting defensive anyway. I don’t know what she’s complaining about. I’ve gone out of my way to make sure my misery doesn’t spill over onto her or anyone else.
If I spend most of my non-working time locked in my bedroom, staring blankly at the text messages he sent me all those days ago when my phone was off, whose business is that but mine?
If I don’t go running or to the gym anymore, who am I hurting besides myself?
And if I don’t want to go out and party with Tori every night in an effort to meet a guy who won’t ever come close to measuring up to Ethan, then why should I?
“I’m not moping,” I tell her as I make a desperate grab for my purse from the backseat.
“What would you call it then?” she demands as she drags me through the gates and into the open air mall.
“I’m thinking.”
“Yeah, well, you’re making yourself sick with all that thinking and I, for one, have had enough of it.”
“So we’re going shopping?”
“Don’t sneer,” she says, narrowing her eyes at me. “I will have you know that shopping is the cure-all for everything. Even your bad attitude.”
“I don’t have a bad attitude!” I tell her with a glare that combats the words. “I’m just tired. Work’s been crazy lately.”
“Work, shmerk. You’ve been brooding. And I get it. I do. Losing Ethan Frost isn’t an easy thing for any woman to recover from—even if he is a total douche.”
“He’s not a douche.” We’ve been over this same ground about a hundred times in the last two weeks.
“He hurt you, which means he will forever be a douche in my book. It’s the best friend code.”
She dances ahead of me then, and with her new spiky green hair and matching minidress, she looks like a leprechaun. A punk rock leprechaun with piercings, tattoos and Doc Martens, but a leprechaun nonetheless.
