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Plus, the guy loved his mother, even if he sucked at showing her so. And I mean, he sucked bad at it. But he’d warned me away from her twice now because he was worried about her. That had to mean something.
If he hadn’t used Reese to get at me, she would probably be okay with him, better off than she’d ever be with me, anyway.
Damn it.
I entered the main building and veered right, no idea where I was going. I just needed to move, to escape this pressure that was building in my chest. It’d be nice if I could escape who I was altogether, or at least un-make all the mistakes I’d made, but I couldn’t, so I just kept striding along.
Just as I was approaching a T-intersection in the hall and I was trying to decide which way to go from there, left or right—God, I hated being forced to make one drastic decision after another—I heard her voice.
“Mason!”
I slowed on instinct, unable to ignore her, but then I realized… What purpose would another conversation right now serve except to make things worse, to make me want her more and then to just hurt her even harder? The result between us was always going to be the same. We could never happen.
“I can’t believe you just walked away from me like that,” she raged. “We are so not done talking about this.”
Not done?
Not done!
What the fuck was she talking about? We hadn’t even started. We could never start. And that’s what killed me most.
Swallowed up by the agony of it, I snapped, letting it consume me whole.
When I spun to face her, she gasped from the unexpectedness of it. I caught her arm just above the elbow and tugged her through the open doorway of a nearby empty classroom. Once I shut us inside alone, I pressed her back to the door and came in close, snarling in her face.
But the anger died on impact because…holy hell. Being this close flipped my world on its axis. Air hissed from my lungs as we nearly touched chest to chest. I felt her immediate arousal from the primal depths of me, and I knew she’d let me do anything I wanted.
And I did want. I wanted every little piece of her, and every part of me screamed for me to just take it.
That’s why I held back. Her trust scared me senseless, made me feel responsible, like I needed to do the right thing. And fucking her against this door was probably not the right thing, no matter how amazing it might feel.
My body was tense and heavy with need as I groaned out my misery and levered my face over her shoulder so I could thump my forehead to the door. Our cheeks brushed past each other in the process, and she shuddered.
Setting my chin on her shoulder, I spilled out my biggest fears, posing them as accusations.
“Was he in your apartment all night? Did he sleep on your couch? Did he touch you? Did he kiss you?” A harsh breath scraped from me as I reached up to touch the scar on the back of her neck. “Did you tell him the secret behind this?”
She touched my cheek and sobbed out a choked breath. “No. Mason. Stop.”
Lifting my face to meet her gaze, I sucked in a painful breath when I saw how red-rimmed her eyes were.
I’d made her cry. What kind of monster would make such a sweet, quirky, cheerful, optimistic girl like this cry?
“God. Reese, I’m trying to be cool about this. I’m trying not to blow off the handle. And I know I’m failing. But damn…”
I wiped away some wetness from under her eye with my thumb.
“This sucks,” I muttered from clenched teeth. “He can ask you out, and take you to dinner, and try to steal a goodnight kiss. He can go as far into it as you’ll let him take you. And I can’t even compete.”
Her eyes misted even more. When she lifted her hand to touch my cheek, I caught her fingers, stopping her.
“You know, I think I fell for you the moment I heard you laugh across the campus courtyard,” I admitted. “When I looked over and saw you, I knew. You were something different. Something incredible. I knew from that first glance that nothing was ever going to be the same again. You were a complete game changer. Even when I realized you were sitting with Eva and might be like her, I didn’t care. I wanted to know everything about you.”
She gave a tear-filled smile. “And here I thought you hated me from that first glance.”
“I never hated you,” I promised. “You just scared the shit out of me, so I tried to stay away. I was afraid to get to know you because I wanted to so badly. I thought surely you couldn’t be as good as I’d already built you up to be in my head. Except every time I turned around, there you were, and you ended up being better than I ever imagined.”
I have no idea why I was admitting all this. But it just kept bleeding out, like a wound that couldn’t heal. “The more I got to know you, the more I knew I should stay away. I could only hurt you. But I could never quite stay far enough away.”
