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Her stomach sank. It was so completely the wrong thing for him to say, the wrong time for him to say it. The wrong feeling.
Rubbing her fingers between her eyebrows, Ellen tried to think herself out of the mess she’d gotten them both into, but she couldn’t. Her heart was beating too fast, pounding out He loves you, He loves you, He loves you, each iteration making her throat hurt from emotion she couldn’t seem to name or claim.
Part of her wanted to go to him, to kiss him, but it got overruled by the much larger part of her that just wanted to end this, to finalize her sabotage of a relationship she never should have allowed in the first place. She’d treated him unfairly, but she couldn’t see her way to doing better. Her life was a mess. She was a mess, selfish and guarded, too twisted up and defensive to love anybody properly.
And was Caleb really any better? What kind of love was he offering her? His protection was another form of disrespect, another brand of manipulation. She couldn’t love somebody like that. Not again.
“What do you want from me?” she asked.
“I want you Ellen. The whole you. I told you that from the beginning. But that was my mistake, wasn’t it?”
Abruptly, he ripped the ice pack off and straightened his bruised fingers, stretching them with his right hand. He’d swung with his left. She hadn’t even known he was left-handed, and the detail punched through her indecision, a final nail in the coffin. She had nothing to give him but more of her inattention, her misplaced resistance and stubborn fear.
His knuckles were swollen and bruised. He needed a woman who would wash out his wounds in warm water. Stitch him up. Comfort him if he lost his job, and help him understand it wasn’t his fault.
She didn’t want to be that woman.
He put on his shirt and started working the buttons with his bad hand, and she couldn’t bear it. She brushed his fingers aside and did it for him and tried not to think about what that made her.
Caleb needed to find someone who could give him her whole heart. Someone generous and strong. She couldn’t even bring herself to go to dinner at his house.
“I’m sorry,” she said after she’d slipped the last button through its hole. “I can’t give you what you want. It wasn’t in the contract.”
He flinched, and then his eyes hardened and he stepped close enough for her to feel the heat coming off his body. He put his cold hand on her face. “You owe me an answer. From last night.”
She didn’t, but he wasn’t asking her. And the truth was, silly game or no, she owed him a lot more than a few answers.
“Ask me.” She met his eyes for a moment. It was hard to look at him directly. It always had been when things turned serious between them. When he was deep inside her, she’d never let herself hold his gaze. She’d never been willing to take the risk. She couldn’t take it now.
Hate me, Caleb, she thought. Go ahead and hate me, and we’ll be done.
“Do you want me? The whole me?”
“I want my life back.”
And then she wondered, as he walked out on her, what would be left of it without him.
Chapter Twenty-seven
“I really don’t think this is going well,” Jamie said. “I think you overestimated the power food would have to bring her around.”
He’d taken the spoon out of the pot to point it at Nana for emphasis, but this caused minestrone to drip on the countertop, earning him Nana’s death look. It was a softer version of Carly’s death look, which meant its power to scare him was effectively nil. These women and their glares. Did they think he was a complete weenie?
They’d never met his mother. Now there was a woman who could glare. He’d spent half his youth practicing voice exercises and piano and choreography to avoid becoming the target of Mom’s laser eyes.
“Leave the worrying to me,” Nana said. “I got you in the room, didn’t I?”
He had to give her that. According to Nana, whoever made the food delivered it, so when Carly had shut herself up in her bedroom immediately after letting him in the house, Nana started teaching him to cook. He could now make hot cocoa, scrambled eggs, fresh-squeezed orange juice, fruit salad, and pancakes. He knew the secrets to compiling a weird sandwich; the weird sandwiches turned out to be Nana’s, and there were convoluted rules. Learning to make soup was a cakewalk by comparison.
If he kept this up, he’d be ready to open his own restaurant by next week, but he was no closer to getting Carly to talk to him than he’d been last night. He needed a new plan.
“Quit stirring that,” Nana said. “Soup doesn’t need to be fussed over. Go find something else to do for a while. And don’t mope around outside Carly’s door, either. You’ll get her hackles up.”
Jamie sighed and left the kitchen. He loved Carly’s house, and her grandma was great, but if he’d known he was going to be stuck rattling around in here without access to Carly, he might have brought something to do. He hated feeling so utterly without resources.
When Ellen and Henry had come over with some clean clothes and a toothbrush, he hadn’t had the heart to send them back to the house to fetch more of his crap. Ellen wasn’t looking her best. Something had gone down with Caleb, but she wouldn’t talk about it, and anyway Henry had been jumping up and down on the couch and insisting Jamie help him search for the Couch Monster, so it wasn’t as if he and Ellen had much of a chance for a heart-to-heart.
He sat down at the piano and let his fingers pick out an aimless line of notes. The Short family’s Steinway was too grand for a hack pianist like him, and he felt almost guilty touching it, but it wasn’t getting a lot of exercise. Carly had told him Nana’s longest-lasting partner had been a concert pianist. He’d died ten years ago.
