Then another thought occurred to me.
What if he really didn’t care? What if he wasn’t in love with me? What if I’d imagined all the deep, intense feelings between us? Maybe I was just a game to him after all.
The cynic in my head spoke up, the one that continued to shame me for breaking the rules and letting him in, the one that forced me to sleep in my own bed some nights. You see? This validates everything. Of course you’re a game! For fuck’s sake, love is a game—and no one plays fair. The only way to win it is to get off the board.
I believed the voice. But a tiny part of me wanted Quinn to fight back, to tell me I was wrong, to insist what we had was real and too good to throw away. Why wasn’t he doing it?
He came into the dining room and reached for my plate. “Are you done?”
“Yes.”
After he took it into the kitchen, I downed the last of my wine and followed him in. “So that’s it, really? That’s all you have to say?”
He didn’t look at me, just kept loading the dishes. “What do you want me to say?”
That you love me, dammit.
Although, if he did…what would that change? Wouldn’t that just make it worse? The problem here wasn’t that we didn’t feel the same about each other; it was that we did. And I couldn’t handle it, so I’d just fucked everything up.
It was my last line of defense.
“Nothing,” I snapped, irrationally angry with him for letting me walk out without a fight and furious with myself for being the kind of person who’d rather be alone than scared. Setting my empty wine glass on the counter with a clunk. “Nothing at all.”
Fighting tears, I stormed out of his apartment, raced up to mine, and threw myself onto my bed, where I cried so hard I didn’t even make a sound.
All this to avoid ending up like Margot, and yet that was exactly where I was—broken-hearted, mad, and desperately wondering if I’d done the right thing.
Twenty-Five
QUINN
I couldn’t sleep. All night long I lay there staring at the ceiling, cursing Jaime’s stubborn streak and her fucked-up ideas about love and relationships.
Did she think I was stupid? Did she think I wouldn’t see through her?
I knew her.
There was no way I’d misjudged her over the last six weeks—she didn’t want to step back from us any more than I wanted to. It was fear, plain and simple. She was afraid of letting herself be happy with me. She saw her friend fall apart after a bad breakup, and it scared her. But rather than come to me and admit that, she’d run in the other direction. She couldn’t handle her feelings for me, so she’d just decided to turn them off.
Well, she’d try to turn them off. But love wasn’t like a fucking oven or faucet or lamp. There was no OFF switch. How was she planning to do it? She’d said something about being friends that occasionally hung out—and I was pretty sure by “hang out” she meant fuck—but there was no way I could do that.
Did she honestly think we could still have sex without feelings?
She wants to think that. She wants to believe that she’s above falling for someone this way.
But she wasn’t. I saw it in her face—she could hardly look at me while she was talking. And then she’d expected me to argue with her, as if that wouldn’t just make her dig her heels in deeper. If I’d thought for one second that hearing me say “I love you, don’t do this” would change her mind, I’d have said it.
But that wasn't the answer.
Jaime wasn’t like any woman I knew. She didn’t need me to declare my feelings—she knew how I felt. This really didn’t have anything to do with me.
It was about her.
She had to get over her fear and her skepticism, and it was something she had to do on her own.
She had to miss me, miss what we had. More than that, she had to see it as something she didn’t want to live without, something worth the risk. I knew she’d miss the sex, and fucking hell, I would too, but she had to miss more than that for her to change. She could get great sex from any guy with half a brain and a functional dick (although I do like to think mine is more than just functional). What we had was something special.
At least, I’d thought it was.
I’d tried hard to be what she wanted, give her the space she needed, respect her boundaries, but if it wasn’t enough, then I’d have to get over her somehow. Move on. Try to forget.
The thought was like a sledgehammer to my chest.
I fucking loved her. I wanted to be with her. I didn’t need her to be perfect or wear a ring or spend every waking moment with me, I just wanted to share my life with her, make her laugh, make her happy—and I wanted some assurance that she wasn’t going to run away whenever she got scared.
I thought about the way my father had taken off on my mother and felt a rush of sympathy for her. Did I love a lost cause, too?
I knew one thing—I’d been wrong to think I could prove to her that love existed…she’d refuse to see it. She didn’t want to see it. She wouldn’t let herself.
And there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
I couldn’t stay here any longer. Knowing she was up there, probably miserable and too stubborn to come down here and talk about it, would drive me crazy. I’d give in and go up to her, and we’d either end up fighting or fucking, neither of which would alter her point of view.
No. She’d turned me away, so I’d give her what she wanted.