Page 140 of Before You Fell

I get up and wait for him outside.

A minute later, he steps through the café door, sliding his phone into his pocket. We walk back toward the car side by side.

He unlocks the car and we climb in.

The engine comes alive and a second later he pulls back onto the road that will take me home.

I stare out the window, but my mind stays in that café.

Maybe watching you almost die fucked up my appetite for bullshit.

I’m not asking him here, in this car, what he meant. Not trapped in a moving vehicle where he can hide behind the road, his sunglasses, and that talent for turning serious things into jokes before they can touch him.

When we reach my apartment, I’m going to ask him what he meant by that. And this time, I’m not letting Phoenix charm, deflect, or fuck his way around the answer.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Phoenix

She has been quiet ever since we left the café. Which, knowing Willow, usually means her brain is chewing on something. Her hands are folded in her lap and her face is turned toward the window.

I know every version of her silence. This one has my name all over it and what I said back there.

I should say something. Tell her it was a joke. Throw a smirk on it and let us both pretend I didn’t just crack open something I have spent years keeping nailed shut.

That’s what I usually do, but I’m sick of the bullshit version of us and of hiding behind jokes when all I want is to tell her the truth.

Fuck, why is this so hard?

I almost lost her. And I still cannot bring myself to say that she is the only thing in my life I don’t know how to survive without.

That I fucking love her.

The words are there, lodged somewhere behind my ribs. But every time I try to drag them up, they catch on all the shit I have done to her.

Fuck, I should have kept my mouth shut in the café. That is usually safest for everyone involved. But my mouth has been getting me laid, paid, and occasionally punched for years, so expecting it to develop wisdom now feels fucking optimistic.

Still, I saw the way she looked at me after what I said. Saw the question rise in her eyes before I walked away, sparing myself the need to explain that my entire personality has become inconvenient since she nearly died.

I need to tell her I want her. Not the way men say it when they mean naked, wet, and waiting.

I want her. All of her.

The one person who kept seeing me through all the noise, even when I gave her every reason to stop looking.

That was the whole point of the café. I didn’t take that turn because I suddenly developed an interest in antique shops and small-town coffee. I went there because I intended to tell her how I feel.

I was going to tell her I have changed. Not suddenly house-trained and ready to sit politely at someone’s feet. Just changed enough to realize I don’t want what we had three months ago.

I want more. More than one night in a storage room, followed by me running scared and leaving her to bleed from it alone.

I had an opening when I mentioned leaving the after-parties early. She asked about it. All I had to do was tell her the fucking truth. That the women stopped looking tempting the second I saw her lying in that hospital bed.

That every greenroom, every hotel suite, every room full of people wanting a piece of me has felt cheap ever since. That once you nearly lose the only person who ever mattered, all the easy shit starts to be exactly as empty as it always was.

But I didn’t have the balls. I still don’t. Because saying I want her is the easy part. Admitting I love her means handing her the one thing in me that has never belonged to anyone else and trusting that I haven’t already broken it beyond repair.

Sitting across from her as she wrapped those lips around a coffee cup was not exactly helping my concentration.