Page 44 of Playing With Temptation

“I don’t need to know this.”

She did need to know how Shay and I started. I also needed to explain why so it didn’t come up later and bite us in the ass.

Before I came here, I’d made the decision that no matter how hard Rainy tried to push me away I wasn’t going to let her. At the bare minimum we were going to be friends. Not acquaintances. Not two people who shared a past and lived in the same small town.

Friends.

I’d lived the nightmare of not having her for sixteen years.

That ended today.

“Baby, you do,” I asserted. “Trust me, it doesn’t fill me with joy laying my shit at your feet. None of this makes me look good. But we need a clean slate, and for that to happen, you need to know that the first time I hooked up after we broke up, I was drunk off my ass. But that’s not why I did it or an excuse. I was back living in HP, I was at the academy, I was trying to get on with my life. So, I fucked her to prove to myself I could.

“And after I felt like shit. Shay knew it. She knew us both from high school. She knew how much I loved you. For the next few months, we’d hang out—no sex, nothing physical—but we became friends. Then it happened again and we decided a friends with benefits situation might work. She knew where my head was at. I was busy with the academy. She was working fulltime at an insurance company, trying to work her way into a better position. She didn’t want a boyfriend or anything that would suck up her time. Then a condom broke. She told me she was pregnant and she wanted to keep it. It was my idea to marry her. I didn’t want my kid growing up without both parents around.”

“Prove you could,” she muttered. “I did it because I was lonely. Because I needed to convince myself I could live without you.”

“Yeah?” I asked leadingly.

“All I did was remind myself that nothing would ever compare to what I’d lost.”

Rainy didn’t lose me, but I didn’t think she needed to be reminded that it was she who ended us.

Her blue eyes turned shiny and she frowned. “I didn’t lose anything. I threw it away. I lost it because I was too stupid to hold on.”

“You’re not now nor have you ever been stupid,” I corrected.

“Really? So me breaking up with you because I was overwhelmed and confused about what I wanted out of life was smart? And me not only ending us, but then deleting you completely because I was jealous and hurt was smart? Looking back, it wasn’t only stupid, it was monumentally asinine. I wasn’t confused about you or us. I was confused about what I wanted to study. I mistook the way our relationship had shifted when you left for college. I continued on that bent when I left and it felt like we’d gone back to being only friends. Did I talk to you about it? No. Instead, I made stupid assumptions. I made a stupid decision that at the time I had no idea the horrific impact it would have on my life, and yours.”

“You were nineteen.”

“So? I was fourteen when I knew I’d found the boy I was going to love for the rest of my life. And I wasn’t wrong.”

With that, I was done.

I stalked across her small living room, skirted the chair, and pulled her death grip free from the cushion.

Then I finally did what I’d wanted to do for the last sixteen years and wrapped my arms around her.

It wasn’t something as simple as a hug.

It wasn’t an embrace.

It was heaven.

Having my Rainy back where she was always meant to be, with her head tipped back, eyes locked with mine? Fuck yeah, heaven.

“Goddamn, you’re gorgeous.”

Her hands resting on my chest balled up the material of my tee. “Jase.”

I dropped my forehead to hers.

“I’ve missed you, Rae. And when I say that, I mean, I really fucking missed you, baby.”

I heard the hitch in her breath before she returned softly, “I missed you, too, Jase. And when I say that, I mean, I’ve missed you every single day for the last sixteen years.”

Rainy’s phone rang. She jolted back and I knew the moment was ruined, and whatever traction I’d gained had been erased when the soft leeched out and uncertainty leaked in.