Page 71 of Direct Action

“I believe that,” she whispered, but it was more like I read her lips than heard the words.

“You wanna go back to my place?” I asked.

Her eyes popped open, and she shook her head.

“This isn’t me,” she murmured.

“What’s not?”

“Today . . . yesterday . . . the attitude. I give you shit for having a personality disorder while I’m guilty of the same. I think in the last forty-eight hours you’ve met seventeen Chloes.”

She blew out a breath and scrubbed her hands over her face.

It wasn’t seventeen—more like three—but I thought now was not the time to quibble.

“You have a lot going on,” I reminded her, and immediately wished I’d kept my trap shut when her eyes filled with tears.

“It’s too much.” Her voice was all wrong—meek and timid, laced with pain.

“Chloe.”

“It’s just all too much,” she semirepeated. “I can’t do this anymore.”

“Do what?”

“Pretend I’m okay. Pretend I’m strong and the weight of my life isn’t drowning me. I’m a total fraud on the verge of a mental breakdown. No, scratch that—I’m officially in the throes of an epic meltdown, and I don’t know how to pull myself out of it.”

And I was adding to that stress. It was time to regroup and stop this stupid-ass bickering.

The last thing she needed right now was me being a demanding asshole.

Honey.

She needed honey.

“Being strong—”

With a shake of her head along with a hand waving me off, she interrupted. “Please don’t recite some lame maxim about being stronger than I think I am—because first, I’m not, and second, if you spout out something unoriginal, I’ll think less of you.”

There she was.

Now that was Chloe.

“Good news for you is I don’t know what the fuck a maxim is,” I teased. “But if you don’t need words, tell me—what you do need?”

“A week’s paid vacation and seventy-nine hours of uninterrupted sleep.”

“Done.”

She blinked—slowly at first, then rapidly. It took Chloe a few beats to respond, but in those seconds her expression telegraphed every thought—suspicion, confusion, wariness, and fatigue.

And I’d been a relentless prick to her.

Yeah, it was time to pivot and do what I should’ve done a long-ass time ago.

“I can’t afford to take a week off of work and I don’t accept handouts, remember?”

The stubborn was inching its way through her forlorn posture. If I didn’t play this right, I’d be back up shit’s creek.