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12
For a few seconds,I have no idea what to say.
Grant is glaring at me with that quietly fierce indignation—but soon I see a helpless bewilderment underneath that just about breaks my heart.
Not for the first time, my own soft heart gets in the way of what I want to do. I almost burst out that I’m sorry, that he’s everything to me, that he’s the only man I’ve ever loved.
Then I remember that he’s left me all day, every day for almost a week without any explanation for his absence.
I remember that he’s never admitted his own feelings for me.
So instead of melting into a puddle of emotion, I match his glare with an expression of confused innocence. “What? Is something wrong?”
“Is something…?” There’s a rumble in his voice. He doesn’t finish repeating my question.
I’m breathing heavily now. My cheeks are hot. With great effort, I manage to keep my voice steady. “Is something wrong?”
He doesn’t answer immediately, but I see emotion churning inside him. Deep. Powerful. So much that it has to boil over—in a way I’ve never seen from him before.
I’m holding my breath as I wait for it.
He’s let go of my shoulders, and now his hands are clenched at his sides. He’s got a day’s worth of dark stubble on his jaw and down his throat. And his forehead and nose are damp with a sheen of perspiration. He forces out his next words as if they resist being spoken. “Do… do you not want me for your man anymore?”
My mouth opens, but no sound comes out. I’ve never been good at playing games, and there’s absolutely no way I can answer that question with anything but the truth.
His head gives a little twitch, and he scowls over his right shoulder. “Well, tough. You can’t have another man! I’m your man until you tell me straight out that you don’t want me anymore.”
Something small and insecure inside me thrills at his gruff indignation. I still can’t manage to verbalize a response.
Grant goes on, “You said I was your man. You said things were good between us.”
This final statement is enough to snap me into a reaction. “That was before you decided to take off every day for a week to do God knows what while telling me exactly nothing! That was before you started acting like I was nothing but a body for you to fuck at night. Did you still expect me to think things were good after being treated like that?”
He’s breathing even louder than I am. Each inhale rasps in his throat. But he blinks a couple of times now, taking a slight step backward. “W-what?”
“You heard me. How do you expect me to feel? Maybe you’ll never love me like I love you, and maybe I’ll eventually be okay with that. But I still thought we were really together! And even in your most infuriating, closed-off years, you still always treated me like I… like I had value. But now…”
Damn it, I burst into tears.
“Oh my fucking God,” he mutters, reaching out and pulling me against his chest so I can sob into his shirt. “What a ridiculous mess.”
“A mess?” I yank myself away. “I’m not the mess here. I’m doing the best I can when you refuse to tell me almost anything!”
His face is different now. That heartbreaking bewilderment has vanished, and his eyes and mouth are very soft. “I know you’re not the mess. I’m the one who fucked this thing up.” He glances around as if searching for something or maybe just deciding what to do. “Come on, princess. I’ll show you what I’ve been doing this week.”
“Really?” My spine stiffens, and hope flares up in my chest. I sniff and wipe my face with the back of my hands.
“Yeah. We’ll have to drive there.”
“But it will be dark in an hour or so. Is it safe?”
“Hmm.” He frowns as he thinks. “We’ll take the Jeep. It’s not that far.”
So before I can process what’s happening and what it means, Grant has gotten me into the Jeep, gone to say a few words to Dave, and then is driving us out of camp again.
“If this was something you could tell me, why didn’t you just do it before?” I ask after a few minutes of trying to pull myself together again.
He shoots me a quick, sidelong look. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”
