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“I love you,” she said.
Hearing it aloud, from her mouth, made my throat thick. I allowed a second for the pleasure to sink in, for that euphoric warmth to spread from my chest to my face, to the lower half of my body. She loved me, and those words alone were doing things to me. She was going to get me hard with one sentence? Goddamn it. I was a grown man who thought with his head, not his dick. I had to get ahold of myself. “Don’t do this, Lake.”
“I can’t just sit back and watch. I have to say something.” Her face, open and sweet, pleaded with me. “You know it’s true, Manning, you have to. You’ve always known that my heart doesn’t function right without you, that food doesn’t taste the same and air is too thick, and my mind is always wandering back to that night on the lake, because I’m all wrong without you, because I’m in love with you.”
23
Lake
Manning hardly moved an inch, arms at his sides. His gray hoodie hugged his biceps but opened as a breeze came off the water. My confession hung in the air between us, and then slowly, pieces of it caught on the wind, scattering away from us.
I’m all . . . wrong . . . without you.
Meeting Manning had taken me apart, and he hadn’t been around to put me back together properly. My limbs had been stitched on, my heart cut out of red construction paper, my cloth outside wearing thin. I wanted to be a real girl, but without him, I was just a bundle of body parts.
I’m in love with you.
I needed to hear it back.
Instead, Manning closed his eyes and asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
My paper heart tore a little. “Because I’ve never said it, and you need to know before you—”
“I do know, Lake,” he said loudly enough to make me jump. “You’ve told me. Maybe not outright, but some way or another, you’ve told me, and it hasn’t always been subtle. You told me that night in the truck. In the lake. On the horse.” The waves had nothing on him, the way he grew bigger, his voice booming. “You told me in the car when I picked you up from the prom. You told me on your eighteenth birthday. You seriously think I don’t fucking know?”
His anger vibrated between us, as loud as the ocean, as acute as the sharp pains in my heart. “You don’t know,” I argued. “You can’t know, or you wouldn’t go through with this.”
“I do know and I am going through with it.” His words, cold and hard, came down as if the sky stormed bricks. “You think I don’t know how you feel? You think I don’t carry the burden of our love on my shoulders just to keep it from crashing down onto you?”
What I wouldn’t give to bear that crash. Couldn’t he understand how badly I wanted that? That I could take on anything with him by my side? “I can handle it,” I said.
“I can’t, and I’ve told you that, but you don’t care how hard it’s been for me.”
“I don’t care?” I whispered. I hiccupped, my nose tingling. The threat of my tears only seemed to make him angrier as he thrust a hand in his hair. “How can you say that?” I asked. “You’re all I care about.”
“No, I’m not. You don’t care about all the ways I’m dying inside. It kills me to know I’ve made you sad and that this strains your relationship with your family.” He flexed his hands, his fingers curling, then reaching for the ground. “It kills me to know there are a million better men out there for you than me, including Corbin. If you cared, you wouldn’t be standing here right now, asking me to pick you when you know, you know I can’t.”
My mouth hung open. He was acting as if I was the selfish one, when all I’d done was love him and do everything in my power to keep it to myself. Or so I’d thought. “Why can’t you? Is it because of her? Do you love her?” One rogue tear escaped, sliding over my cheek. “Do you love her . . . more than me?”
He smacked his fist against his chest. “I am not the man for you,” he said. “I can’t give you the life you deserve.”
“You can.” I called on all my strength to inhale back my tears and show him he was wrong. “I’ve never been more sure of anything.”
“All right, Lake,” he said. “If you’re so sure, then tell me how it works.”
“What do you mean?”
“You want me to pick you? Fine.” He threw up his arms. “To hell with it. I pick you. What happens next?”
