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Given the craziness surrounding the CEO vote, we hadn’t discussed my book’s progress before I left. I felt even shittier admitting my failure to Kai than I had to my family. He’d tried to help so much, with the typewriters and the writer’s block suggestions, and I’d still let him down.
“That’s okay,” he said gently. “You will. It wasn’t a hard deadline.”
Once upon a time, his unwavering faith had bolstered me. Now, it only made me feel worse because I didn’t deserve it.
“Maybe not with a publisher, but it was to my family.” I gave him a brief overview of what happened on my mom’s birthday. Anxiety hummed, high-pitched and tight like I was sitting in the living room shriveling beneath my family’s scrutiny again.
When I finally looked up, my stomach pitched at the darkness cloaking Kai’s face.
“Your brother,” he said, “is an asshole.”
The sentiment was so blunt and unlike him that it startled a quick burst of laughter out of me.
“Yeah, he prides himself on it.” My smile melted as easily as it formed. “But he wasn’t wrong. Neither…” I forced oxygen into my lungs.Just say it.“Neither was your mom. About us.”
Just like that, the air shifted. Levity vanished, giving way to a thick, creeping tension that strangled me like a thorny vine.
Kai fell eerily still. “Meaning?”
My heart wobbled. “Meaning we’re not a good match,” I said, forcing the words past the hard lump in my throat. “And we should…we should see other people.”
I stumbled on the last half of my sentence. It came out jagged and broken, like it’d been dragged through barbed wire on its way up my throat.
I didn’t know where the sentiment came from because the last thing I wanted was to see someone else or seeKaiwith someone else, but talking was the only way to keep my emotions at bay.
Kai’s eyes were flat, fathomless plains of granite. “See other people.”
“You have so much going on with the company and work, and I have a lot of life stuff I need to figure out.” I rushed the excuses out before I lost my nerve. “We would be distractions to each other. I mean, it was fun while it lasted, but we never had a future. We’re too different. You know that.” My words tasted like cyanide—bitter and poisonous enough to stop my heart from beating.
“Is that what we have?” Kai asked quietly. He still hadn’t moved. “Fun?”
Misery closed my throat. I was drowning again, weighed down by self-loathing and helplessness. If I were someone else watching me do what I was doing, I would scream at me to stop being an idiot. I had this gorgeous, brilliant,amazingman—a man who supported and encouraged me, who kissed me like I was his oxygen and made me feel seen for the first time in my life—and I was pushing him away.
Not because I didn’t care about him, but because I cared about him too much to hold him back or have him resent me down the road. One day, he would wake up and realize I was so much less than who he thought I was, and it would crush me. I was saving us both from inevitable heartbreak before we got too deep.
You’re already in too deep, a voice whispered before I pushed it aside.
“Yes.” I forced my response past stiff lips. “The holidays, the secret room, the private island…they were incredible experiences, and I don’t regret them. But they’re not sustainable. They were—” The sentence broke, flooded with tears. “They were never meant to be forever.”
Something hot and wet slipped down my cheek, but I didn’t bother brushing it off. My eyes were too full, my chest too tight. I couldn’t breathe fast or deep enough, and I was certain I was going to die here, at this table, with my soul empty and my heart in pieces.
A muscle jerked in Kai’s cheek, his first visible reaction since I broached the subject. “Don’t do this, Isabella.”
Steel hands crushed my lungs at the raw, aching sound of name.
“You’re better off with someone like Clarissa,” I continued, hating myself more with each passing second. My voice was so thick and watery it sounded unrecognizable to my own ears. “She’s what you need. Not me.”
Another tear dripped off my chin and into my lap. Then another, and another, until there were too many to account and they blended into one ceaseless, unending river of grief.
“Stop.” Kai’s fingers curled into white-knuckled fists. “If I wanted someone like Clarissa, I would be with Clarissa, but I’m not.I want you.Your laugh, your sarcasm, your inappropriate jokes and strange love for dinosaur erotica…”
A tiny laugh bloomed in the desert of my grief. Only Kai could make me laugh at a time like this.To think I once said he was boring.
His fleeting smile matched mine before it slipped. “We’re so close, Isa. Valhalla, theNational Star, the CEO vote…there’s nothing stopping us from being together. Don’t give up on us. Not now. Not like this.”
My brief moment of lightness died.
The pain in his voice matched the one consuming me. It was worse than the times I broke my arm or accidentally sliced my hand because it wasn’t physical. It was emotional, and it stole so deep into my soul that I was sure I could never dig it out.
