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A fresh fucking start.
Yeah, there was shit to sort.
A lot of shit.
Because clean slates were well and good in practice, but they didn’t work in reality. And he wanted them to be in reality. Not some fantasy where they could go on from everything they’d been through without mentioning it.
Heath didn’t want to mention it.
He didn’t want to even think about her marrying another man. Building a life with him. Then breaking it apart.
He hated the thought of her with someone else. So bad he wanted to rip the skin from his body.
But what he hated more than that was the thought of her in any kind of pain. And that’s what got him through when she’d actually married the fucker. That she wasn’t in pain. That she was with someone else. Happy. It killed him that it wasn’t with him, but he could breathe knowing she was happy.
But when it ended, he hadn’t felt relief, not immediately. He felt dread, utter bone-deep dread at the thought of Polly going through pain. Because she put her whole heart into everything she did. And he knew that whatever everyone else thought, she wouldn’t jump out of marriage as soon as she jumped in for no good reason.
And a good reason involved a fuck load of pain for her.
Then he’d turned cruel and bitter and contributed to that pain. He hurt her because he was hurt himself and he didn’t deal with that shit well. Or at all.
Then that kiss.
That fucking kiss.
Every kiss with her was spectacular. Beyond anything. But every single one was something different. Because it meant so much more than a kiss. Ever since the first time she’d pressed her lips against his.
“I just wanted to see what it was like to kiss you.”
The open honesty, the beauty of it hit him in the cock and chest cavity simultaneously. And he knew then, in that shitty bar, in what he thought was going to be a shitty night—a shitty three days—that he’d found her.
Her in the sunflower dress and fucking pigtails.
Far too young for him.
Too good.
Too naive.
But he took her anyway because he’d known he couldn’t have her forever, even if that’s what he itched for. She was it. She was fucking his. And he wouldn’t be able to have her. So he’d been greedy, needing to have as long as he could to carry him through the years.
That’s why he reacted the way he did when he saw her again.
Like a fucking crazy person. Trying to claim her like the years hadn’t passed. Because to him, they hadn’t. She was still his. She was still it.
He wouldn’t have come on like he did had he not seen it on her too. Because she wore her heart in her eyes, in the effort she put into hiding things from her sister. He saw that she wanted him too. And as a man who’d made an art out of controlling everything in his life, the fact he couldn’t control the one thing that mattered drove him crazy.
So instead of being gentle, trying to see where she was coming from, he treated it like a battle, a war, reasoning he’d get through to her and then get her.
He’d tried to use a battle to get the girl who lived for peace.
He was a fucking idiot.
And he shouldn’t have been surprised when she had another man. One that he hated instantly on principal and also because there was something off about him. But then he’d searched for evidence, a shred of it to give him a solid reason to kill the fucker. He knew Lucy and Rosie were doing the same. No one found anything.
And Polly had her heart set on this. No, she had her mind set on it. He saw that. So he had to step aside. Let her work through it.
He hated it, but he’d gotten it.
He did not expect her to fucking marry the fucker. For him to push her that far away. Yeah, that fucked him up. He wanted to hate her just so he could stop wanting her.
But he didn’t hate her.
Not when she walked down the aisle looking utterly beautiful but not like her.
Not when she left the man two months later. Not when she walked away from him for a fucking year.
And not when she came back.
But he acted like he hated her because he couldn’t act like he had before. Because he was scared that he’d push her into the arms of someone else.
He’d hurt her acting like that. He’d seen it. Because he saw everything with her. And he wanted to stop, but he fucking couldn’t. Because his coldness was the only thing he could control. Even if it was fucking bullshit.
He’d been driving her to hate him, so maybe he wouldn’t love her so much. But every day, seeing how much she gave to everyone around her, even when it meant taking everything she had, watching her doing it with a brightness and that outshone the sun, he loved her more and more each day.
