Page 215 of Rising Heat
“Yeah, well, lucky you, every time I get myself worked up enough to think you deserve it, I remember I was standing right there too.” I scrub a hand over my face. “Hard to decide which one of us deserves the black eye.”
“Still not denying it.”
Mack leans both hands against the counter and drops his head before he speaks again.
“She believed it.”
I look up.
“What?”
“When I said…” His jaw works once before he finishes. “…we’re not trying to keep you. What she heard wasn’t what I meant.”
“I know that.”
“But she believed it.”
“Clearly.”
He rubs a hand through his damp hair and lets out a slow breath.
“It doesn’t matter.”
I don’t argue with him, because I know exactly what he means.
“I keep thinking…” He stares past me for a second before he finally says it. “What if she doesn’t come back?”
My grip tightens around the travel mug.
I’ve spent the last four days refusing to look at that thought. It’s easier to tell myself she just needs a few days with her parents, enough time to scrape Brett out of her head and remember Boston’s home now. That we’re home now.
Except I know Darcy.
By now she’s probably replayed every conversation we’ve had since February until they stopped sounding like the conversations we actually had. She’ll find one sentence that doesn’t fit and keep pulling at it until everything else comes loose with it.
“I don’t wanna think about that.”
“Neither do I.”
He shakes his head.
“But if she comes back—”
His voice catches just enough that I barely hear it.
“If she only wants one of us...”
For a second I can’t even look at him. We’d managed to dance around that sentence for four days without either of us being stupid enough to say it out loud, and somehow hearing it makes all three futures I’d been trying not to think about show up at once.
The first one’s so selfish I almost hate myself for it.
What if she picks me?
The thought barely has time to settle before something uglier crashes straight into it.
What if she only picks me because Mack said the wrong thing?
I try to physically shake the thought from my head, but it doesn’t stop my brain from chasing the rest of it. How the hell am I supposed to build a life on top of that? Wake up next to the woman we both fell in love with and spend the rest of it wondering whether she would’ve still ended up beside me if Saturday had gone differently. Or beside him. Or right where we’d all been headed before one sentence blew up the whole thing.
