Page 20 of Better Off Wed
“I’m sorry about last night,” he said after a moment. He looked at my suitcases. It took long, sticky seconds for him to meet my eyes. He swallowed. “I know how little interest you have in sex. I shouldn’t have pressured you into that. Especially not when I know you aren’t interested in having sex withme.”
A frown pulled at my brows. There was a lot to unpack there, and I didn’t know where to start. What came out of my mouth was, “You didn’t pressure me.”
“You don’t have to do that.” He waved a hand. “Make excuses. I know what I did last night, and I feel like I need to scrub the skin off my body for how ashamed of myself I am.”
Confusion clouded my thoughts. I couldn’t follow what he was saying. “What you did last night?”
“Forced myselfon you.” He spat the words, gaze sliding to the side. “God. I don’t know… I don’t even recognize myself.”
“You didn’t force yourself on me!”
“Stop it, Sadie?—”
“No, you stop it.” My voice was sharp as a blade. “You’redoing that thing again, where you tell me what I’m supposed to be thinking. How about this time, for a change, you listen to me. I wanted to…to do what we did.” My cheeks flushed. I couldn’t say anything more crass than that, or I’d burst into flames. I certainly couldn’t tell him that I’d wanted him from the moment I’d seen him, or that I’d lied on my application, or that even now, when I had decided to leave, I wanted to push him down onto the couch, straddle his lap, and kiss him.
I took a deep breath. We stared at each other. The truth hovered on my lips, but I was nothing more than a coward. Now that Gideon was here, it wasso hardto tell myself I never wanted to see him again. No one had ever made me feel as electric, as alive, as he did.
But that was because he didn’t know the truth about my body. My shortcomings.
I already knew therealtruth. The truth that was as consistent as the sunrise and predictable as the tide.
I would never be enough.
Gideon proved it by shuttering his expression. “Either way, at least now we know that this was never going to work.”
There was a boulder in my throat, so all I could do was nod.
“Where will you go?”
I took a sip of my drink. Delicious. It made me want to cry, but instead I shrugged. “I guess I’ll move back in with my parents.” Even as I said it, I couldn’t help my grimace.
Gideon watched me as he took his own drink out of the tray. He tossed the cardboard onto the kitchen counter and made his way to the opposite couch. He sat, took a sip, then said, “You could stay here.” As soon as the words left his mouth, it wasGideon’s turn to grimace. Because the thought of me being near him was repulsive.
I wasn’tthatmuch of a masochist. I just laughed and replied, “That’s okay. I’ll figure it out.”
“I mean, we have six weeks.”
“Five weeks and six days.”
“Right.” He swallowed. Tugged at a thread on his jeans, then adjusted the collar of his long-sleeve tee where it sat over his scars. I wondered how much of his chest and back were covered in them. The sliver of chest I’d seen last night had been unmarred, other than his left shoulder. He caught me looking at him and narrowed his eyes. “Why did you sign up for this in the first place?”
Because I was off-balance and tender, knowing that I wanted him and he definitely didn’t want me, I went on the attack. “I’m a hopeless romantic,” I said, echoing his words from yesterday. “Emphasis on the hopeless.”
His glare was flat and unimpressed. “Come on, Sadie. I think by now we can be honest with each other.”
There he went, saying my name again in that indecent, dark velvet voice of his. I squirmed and tried to cover it up by taking a sip of my drink. Finally, I said, “You first.”
I expected him to brush me off again, but instead, he studied me for a beat and said, “My grandmother blackmailed me into it.”
Shock stole my words. I gaped at him, then recovered enough to ask, “What do you mean?”
“First, she threatened to cut me out of the will.”
My brows jumped. “Wow.”
“To be fair,” he added with a grin, “she threatened to cut us all out of the will.”
“You were…okay with that?”
