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Hannah drew in one ragged breath, then another, swiping at a strand of her hair that had fallen across her face.

“Somehow,” she said, her voice unsteady, “when I was thinking about how I wanted to wrap up the year, I never put making out with my first love on my bingo card.”

She was trying for lightness, but he could see the faint tremor in her hands, the jump of her pulse at the base of her throat.

His body reacted to it, raw and immediate, and he had to grip his hands into fists to keep from reaching for her again.

“Yeah,” he managed. “Neither did I.”

He tried for the same light tone. “Obviously there must still be a little spark between us.”

Her gaze narrowed, the softness of her features turning sharp and hot.

“A little spark,” she repeated, each word clipped. “Right.”

He winced inwardly. Wrong thing to say.

“Hannah—”

“I worked hard to put myself back together after you left,” she said, cutting off whatever he was going to say.

Her voice was low, vibrating with emotion. “You have no idea how hard it was. I thought we were in love for the rest of our lives. And then you were just . . . gone. No calls. No texts. Nothing.”

He flinched. He had reasons for the way he had handled it back then. At the time, they had seemed valid. Now they sounded thin, even to him.

“I threw myself into school,” she went on. “Into studying, working, anything that would keep me from thinking about you every second. I told myself I was being dramatic, that I would get over you in a few weeks, a few months.”

She drew in a ragged breath. “It took years, Wes. Years to stop waiting for a call that never came, to stop seeing you every time I closed my eyes.”

She swallowed hard. “I’m not about to throw out all that effort and energy by letting you wreck me again, just because we find ourselves in a hotel room together in the middle of the night.”

Guilt slammed into him, thick and suffocating. He deserved every word. More than every word.

“I never meant to wreck you,” he said hoarsely. “I thought I was—”

“Doing me a favor?” she shot back. “Protecting me from the person you were becoming?”

He shut his mouth. Anything he said right now would sound like an excuse. Because it would be.

“I know you had your reasons,” she finally said, her voice still scraped raw. “I know your family was in crisis. I know you were barely holding it together. Intellectually, I get all of that. But the person I was back then didn’t understand. She only knew that the only man she had ever loved walked away and never looked back.”

He wanted to tell her that wasn’t true, that he had looked back more times than he could count, that there had been nights in Portland when he’d nearly gotten in his car and driven all night just to see her face.

“I’m sorry,” he said instead, the words inadequate but all he had. “Hannah, I am so damn sorry for the way I left. For how much I hurt you.”

Her eyes glistened, but she tipped her chin up stubbornly, refusing to let the tears fall. “I believe you,” she said. “I do. But that doesn’t erase what happened. Or make whatever this is between us now any less dangerous.”

She drew in a slow breath, squaring her shoulders. “Good night, Wes. We’ve got a long day again tomorrow. We should both try to get some sleep.”

He wanted to ask her to stay. To sit back down and talk this through. But tiredness pressed at his bones, the soul-deep weariness of a man who had been running from his own past for far too long.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “You’re right.”

She turned toward her bedroom, then paused with her hand on the knob. When she looked back at him, her eyes were steady, her voice low.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think it was just a little spark.”

Before he could respond, she opened the door and slipped inside, closing it softly behind her.