AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Want and doing are very different things.’
‘They don’t have to be.’
‘You’ll wake up one day and want me gone. Just like my mother. Just like all those foster parents...’
‘Not Gran. She loved you from the moment she met you.’
‘Because I left. Because I stayed away. Don’t you see? If I’d tried to make a home here, eventually she’d have seen the real me. She’d have turned me away just like all the rest.’
He’s shaking his head. ‘You couldn’t be more wrong.’
‘Life has proved otherwise.’
‘No, Summer. This doesn’t have to end—not if we don’t want it to.’
‘All things end, Edward. It’s a universal truth.’
‘Yes, but we can choose that ending. And I’d rather go to my grave loving you than live the rest of my life without you.’
My body gravitates towards him, pleading for his warmth, his kiss, anything to fill the emptiness inside me.
‘Open your heart to the possibility, Summer.’
‘It hurts...’
‘Life hurts. There are no certainties. I know that. But I also know that the hardest things in life—the things that hurt the most—do so because they’re worth it. You are worth it. Don’t turn your back on what we have out of fear.’
He lifts his other hand, cups my face in both as he looks into my eyes.
‘Let me love you and make a future with you and prove you otherwise.’
And then he kisses me, and the world seems to settle. The ground beneath my feet solidifies, my heart calms...and then I’m transported back, standing in a cold corridor, Ted clutched in my hand, watching the woman I’d tried to be everything for walk away, and I’m shoving at his chest.
‘No. No. No.’ I can’t breathe... I can’t see. ‘I can’t do this. I can’t.’
I race for the door, for the back of the house, away from the guests, the press, and the ball still underway. I break out into the garden and the cold wraps around me, invades me.
But it’s not enough.
I don’t want to feel any more. I want the heat of his touch off my skin. The heat of his words out of my heart. I need to escape. I need to be free.
I need it to be just me.
Safe. Known. Protected.
