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“I’ve let you in, though.” She cocked her head to the side. “I’ll tell you anything about myself. Even the worst parts.”
My heart cracked. Not all the way through, but just enough for it to hurt.
I started to say I didn’t know, but that wasn’t true. “I know. And I know I haven’t let you in as much as you deserve. I don’t know how, though. I don’t know how to open up to you.”
“I thought we were different.” She looked away from me. “Am I not enough for you to learn and try to be more open?”
The crack in my heart got deeper. I should have felt like taking on the challenge of revealing my deepest self. She wasn’t like any other woman I’d known. And being with her alongside my two closest friends should have been more than enough to change me.
But all I felt was the weight of her disappointment, just as I’d disappointed most people in my life. My father. My exes, both serious and casual. Who was I kidding, thinking that I’d magically become the kind of man who could be in a relationship with a woman like her? The kind of man who was able to give her everything she deserved?
“Taylor, I can’t do this. I can’t be the man that you need me to be.”
Taylor’s mouth popped open in shock again. “What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said. I can’t be open and soft like Harrison. I’m just not like that, as much as I care about you,” I said. “So maybe it’s best that we go back to how things were.”
She cried through her incredulous laughter. “You mean go back to things being awkward and tense? With you just being my bodyguard?”
I ran my hand over my hair. It was too short to pull at it in frustration. “I don’t mean that. But I do mean the latter. That I’ll just be your bodyguard because I can’t be open.”
“Even though you trust me?”
“Even though I trust you.” I swallowed, looking past her head. “I’m sorry, Miss Bailey.”
“Don’t call me Miss Bailey,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“But that’s all you can be to me now. A client.” I pushed back from the table.
“I didn’t know you’d walk away from me this easily,” she said as I started to walk away.
“Nothing about this is easy.”
“But you’re not exactly fighting for me, are you? Or trying to change?” She got up.
“People can’t change overnight, if they can even change at all,” I said, going back to my room. I hadn’t slept in it in a long time, but I wasn’t going to be in Taylor’s bed anymore. “Especially me.”
CHAPTER28
Taylor
The whiplash of this evening was giving me a headache. No, the whiplash of this entire week—from my stalker attacking me in broad daylight, to Cody wanting to only have the physical side of our relationship, to Ethan revealing what he thought about my dad’s death, then dumping me.
I wanted to stay in bed forever. Maybe the guys were right to be hesitant about jumping into something with me. Now we had to see each other all the time. I didn’t doubt that they’d continue to protect me with everything they had, but it was just awkward. Every little thing was a reminder of what we didn’t have anymore.
Harrison was spooned behind me. I was so glad to have him there through all of this, always ready to make me smile.
“Hey, I’m going to work out,” he murmured in my ear. “Do you want coffee before I go?”
“No, I’ll get it myself,” I said, yawning. “But thank you.”
He kissed my temple and hopped out of bed. He pulled on his workout shorts and shirt before heading to the room they’d started to use for their workouts. I put my face into my pillow again and sighed.
I still hadn’t looked at the packet of information that Ethan had dropped on me like a bomb. But every idle moment I had, I thought about it.
Ethan might have been detached and not emotionally available, but he was far from stupid. He’d had a hunch and investigated it. And it had made him believe that my dad had been poisoned. He went about telling me in the bluntest way possible, but that didn’t mean he was wrong by any means. He wasn’t going to tell me anything he hadn’t thoroughly investigated.
I rolled over to my nightstand and pulled out the papers with shaky hands. They were neat, with his tidy handwriting annotating some of the notes. I bit my lip and finally let myself read the pages.
