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I stilled, one hand on the bottle, the other gripping the top.
“I know that we should have ended it before you even left. You were going to university, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and we were at that point where we had to make a decision about our relationship, and neither of us did.”
“So you took it upon yourself to do it without talking to me about it?” I put the bottle down a little too vigorously and spun around to look at him. “Is that really what we’re going with here?”
“I was going to move, Charlotte.”
“What?”
Noah’s eyes darkened. “I was going to move to you. I just didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life—I was even looking up apprenticeships and jobs near your uni.”
The weirdest feeling trickled through me, like a mix of disbelief and… God, sadness.
Disbelief and sadness.
“Why didn’t you tell me that?” I asked.
“When you didn’t tell me you loved me back, I wasn’t sure what the right thing to do was. We were only eighteen, and Gramps told me not to make any rash decisions. He thought it would be best for me to stay here and get some kind of qualification, then move later.”
I swallowed. That was the same advice I could see myself giving someone in that situation, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it.
“The constabulary had an open recruitment day aimed at young people, and I went along to get him off my back. I ended up enrolling into the next intake, and as it got more intense, I didn’t have as much time as I thought I would, and our relationship was the thing that suffered from that.”
“You should have told me,” I said, holding his gaze. “I would have understood if things were different for a while. We could have figured it out.”
“I know. I know that now,” he corrected himself. “Believe me, I regret it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I truly forgot to reply,” Noah continued, and I could see in his eyes that he was telling the truth. “By the time I realised it’d been weeks since we’d spoken…” He blew out a breath and shook his head. “You hadn’t text me for ages, Ash told me you hadn’t replied to her, and I figured you’d moved on.”
“I had no choice.” I wrapped my arms around my waist, hugging myself. “I had studying to do—I had a whole life to live that couldn’t revolve around waiting for you to text me back. I assumed you were too hurt by my refusal to tell you how I felt and wanted to end things.”
“That’s not true. I’m sorry, truly. Especially that you thought you had anything to do with it. You had to know that I would never have done anything to hurt you.”
“I did. Once,” I said softly, looking down at my feet.
His footsteps echoed across the wooden floorboards as he approached me, and the feeling of his hands resting on my upper arms sent tingles darting across my skin. It’d been years, yet there something so familiar about the way he touched me. Something so soothing in the sensation of his fingertips twitching against me, and boy, was I glad I was wearing a cardigan.
I’d have lost my mind if he was touching my bare skin.
“Lot—Charlotte,” he said softly, barely an inch away from me, far too close to me for me to be able to think of anything but the hint of coffee on his breath and the earthy, woody scent of his cologne.
God.
Even his cologne was hot.
Who had I hurt to be this tortured? What had I done in a past life?
“I never intended to hurt you.” Noah’s voice was low, a gentle rumble in the breath of air between our bodies, and he rested one of his hands on my cheek. “You know that, I know you do.”
“But you did.” I raised my gaze to meet his. “You did, Noah, and you can’t take that back.”
“I wish I could.”
“But you can’t.” I paused, trying to ignore the way goosebumps pebbled across my skin in a wave. “And how I deal with that hurt right now is my responsibility, not yours. Now that I know, I can do that. But I’m going to need time before I can even think about being friends with you.”
The pain in his eyes was like a knife to my stomach.
