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And she walked out of the house, her heart pounding a sickening rhythm in her head.
And she got into her truck, and drove toward Sullivan’s Point. And she waited. To see headlights behind her. To see Gus coming after her.
Because Gus... Gus had always been there for her. Until she’d asked for this.
She had to just make the drive. She couldn’t fall apart. Not now.
It took five minutes to get to Sullivan’s Point, and each one of them felt interminable.
Finally, she arrived, and she got out of the truck, practically falling out and running to the farmhouse.
It was Fia that answered the door.
“Alaina...”
“I left,” she said.
And then she dissolved into heartrending tears. And she didn’t think she would ever be whole again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
GUSWASSTILLtrying to figure out what the hell had happened. He was standing in his kitchen, with his hands in a bowl, covered in flour.
She had asked for him to love her. She had asked for him to love her.
And he couldn’t do it.
He couldn’t do it.
He put his hand on his chest. There was a sharp pain there, and it felt like a heart attack. Maybe it was a heart attack.
That would figure. He couldn’t access his damn emotions so his heart was going to give out on him. Like it was forcing him to involve it.
It doesn’t need to force you, you jackass.
What the hell was this? And what did any of it matter? What did it fix?
Why couldn’t she just accept what they had?
Why...?
Because you feel it. You know it’s there. You know it’s there. You hold her at arm’s length.
Well, what was the other choice? To just... To admit how much he needed her? He couldn’t do that. That was insanity. He couldn’t be...needy and in pain, he couldn’t be weak.
He could never be that idiotic boy lying in a bed at thirteen, clutching unopened army men, comfort he wished he could take while he lay there burned all to hell, still convinced that his mother was going to come back for him.
He had wanted... All he had wanted was for somebody to love him enough to protect him.
That was all he had wanted. And it wasn’t there. It didn’t exist.
He stormed up the stairs and kicked the door open to his childhood room. All this bullshit that Alaina had gotten out of the boxes and set up. All this bullshit.
He growled, and he swept his hand across one of the shelves, flinging all the toys there onto the floor.
They had never meant anything. Parting gifts. Shit that she had left them with. That wasn’t them.
And he had loved her. And what had that gotten him? He had loved her, and she had left him to die.
