Page 176 of Pucked Around and Found Out

Her eyes narrow slightly. “What's that?”

“Me.” I lean forward, elbows on the table, and hold her gaze without flinching. “You accounted for Cas. For Alex. For the towns, the cartel, the power balance. You thought about everyone.” A beat. “You didn't account for the possibility that I'd come after you.”

The neutrality in her face develops a hairline fracture. She covers it fast but not fast enough.

“There's nothing to come after,” she says. “I made my choice. I left.”

“You did.” I don't argue with it, don't dress it up. “You stood on that beach and you said goodbye and you walked away and I stood there and let you because I'm—” The word jams somewhere in my throat. I work my jaw. “Because I couldn't say what needed to be said.” I watch her carefully. “I'm not built for it. You know that better than anyone.”

“I know.” Her voice frays slightly at the edge. She firms it up immediately. “That's exactly why I left.”

“I know why you left.” I lean back, fold my arms. “I'm not here to tell you that you were wrong. You weren't.” The admission costs me something measurable and I make no effort to hide that. “You were right about everything. I shut you out. I kept you at a distance because letting someone in has historically destroyed everything I love and I wasn't—” Another jam. Another forced push through it. “I wasn't ready to survive losing something else.”

She's very still.

“So instead you just made sure I'd leave.” Her voice is quiet. Not accusatory… just honest, in that way she has that cuts cleaner than any insult. “You made the decision for both of us.”

“Yes.” No deflection. No justification. Just the word, flat and true.

The silence between us is different from the silence on the beach. That one had desperation in it, the frantic, wordless negotiation of two people hoping the other one blinks first. This one is quieter. Older. Like something that's been sitting in a room alone for weeks, waiting.

She looks down at her textbook. Then back up at me.

“What do you want, Xaden.” Not a question. A reckoning.

“You.” The word comes out without the hesitation I expected. Raw and undecorated and entirely without the performance I usually wrap around anything that matters. “Not the version of you that fits neatly into my life. Not the version I can control or keep at a manageable distance.” I hold her gaze and don't let myself look away because she deserves that much, to see that I mean it, that I'm not going to take it back the moment it makes me uncomfortable. “You. All of it. The parts that scare me. Especially those.”

Her eyes are glassing over and I watch her fight it with everything she has.

“You don't do this.” Her voice comes out rough. “You don't show up and say things like⁠—”

“I know what I do.” I cut her off quietly. “I'm aware of exactly what I am and what I'm capable of and how much damage I can do to someone who gets close enough.” I pause. “I'm also aware that you already know all of that. You knew it on that beach. You knew it every time I shut you out and you stayed anyway.” I lean forward again. “You're not naive about who I am. You never were. Which means when I tell you I'm not leaving here without you, you understand what that means coming from me.”

“That sounds a lot like a threat,” she says, but her voice has changed. Something underneath the armor is shifting, the way tectonic plates move, slow, enormous, inevitable.

“It's not a threat.” I hold her gaze. “It's the only honest thing I know how to give you right now. I'll learn the rest. I'll figure out the parts I'm missing and I'm missing a lot, I'm not pretending otherwise.” Something tightens in my jaw. “But I'm not walking out of this coffee shop without you knowing that I came. That I looked for three weeks. That I booked a flight with no plan and no script because—” The sentence resists me. I push through it anyway. “Because you are the only thing in my life that has ever felt like it belonged there.”

The tear that falls is the one that she doesn't catch in time. She swipes it away with the back of her hand immediately, almost angrily, and I feel something that might be the closest thing to tenderness I'm capable of at the sight of it.

She looks at me for a long moment. Searching. Reading me the way she always has, past the surface, past the mask, straight down to whatever sits underneath.

Then she looks down at her stomach.

Then back up at me.

“This isn't simple, Xaden.” Her voice is raw. “This isn't you showing up and everything just—” She exhales. “There's so much. There's so much you don't say and I can't keep⁠—”

“I know.” I don't let her finish because she's right and I'm not going to argue with it. “It's not simple. It was never going to be simple.” I hold her gaze. “I'm not here because it's simple. I'm here because it's you.”

The words land.

I watch them land.

She closes her eyes for a moment, just a moment and in that moment she looks like someone putting down something extraordinarily heavy that they've been carrying alone for a very long time.

When she opens them again, she doesn't look resolved or certain or any of the things that make moments like this comfortable.

She just looks like herself.