“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me!” I stressed, feeling my eyes mist over in panic. “I have a life here! I can’t have it turn upside down because of you. How am I meant to land a goddamn job fresh out of Uni if everyone in town is going to recognize me as your fling?”

His eyes immediately darkened. “What did you just say?”

I didn’t respond.

He moved closer to me, his anger exploding out of him as he gritted out, “Did you call yourself a fling, Leah?”

“That’s what they’ll be calling it, Carter.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck what they call it! That’s what they do, remember? They lie. They fucking lie about everything! If they want to call you a fling, then let them. We know the truth, and the longer you’re around, the more they’ll realize what we have is real.”

I just blinked at him for a moment, incredulously. What did he just say? I pulled my hand away from his. “The longer I’m around, Carter? I’m not going to be around because I’m here and you’re over there –”

“We have something,” he cut in sharply. “There’s so potential here to make this work.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Of course I do. You have my word, Leah.”

“And you think your word means anything to me after all we’ve been through?” I seethed, completely losing my shit. “You broke my heart, Carter. You made me believe so many times during our time together that there was something more between us, and then you destroyed me! You can’t sit here and tell me that we can make this work when I have a list of reasons to doubt you.”

“Look at me,” he suddenly said, softly. Grabbing at my face with both hands, he turned me to him. “Leah, I want you. Just you. Only you. Don’t cheapen yourself right now. Don’t think of yourself as a fling. You’re not. You’re the only real thing in my life right now, and I can’t stand the thought of you walking away from this. I’m not that guy anymore. Are you hearing me? I’m not that guy anymore, Leah.”

His voice broke as he pleaded to me, and my eyes were sore from the tears swimming behind them. This was a different sort of pain. We lived two completely different lives. Even if I wanted to make this work, I knew it couldn’t. Our kind of relationship needed a lot of healing, and a man as busy as him couldn’t put aside that time to nurture us after our kind of fucked-up past. Regardless, I wasn’t naïve anymore. He could give me his word until he was black and blue in the face, my heart refused to believe it. I’d been put through the wringer too many times to fall for words.

This had been a mistake. A giant step backwards.

“Carter,” I said quietly, forcing the words out one by one, “I told you already: I’m not the same person either.”

He dropped his hands from my face and collapsed to the ground, looking at me with disbelief. “What happened between us, Leah? What did we just do last night?”

I sighed. “We spent the day together, and then we had sex.”

“Do you have to make it sound so clinical?”

“I don’t mean to.”

“Do you regret what we did?”

I paused, hesitating. “No.”

“Then you know more happened than us just fucking. Admit it. You felt it, what we have. How amazing it could be. Admit that much at least. Don’t be like I used to be. Don’t be a coward, Leah. You’re better than that.”

I looked into his eyes, saddened by the hope that lingered there. “You came back into my life, and you’re incredible. I see that. Maybe you’ve changed. But… I…” I took a few deep breaths, feeling the hot tears flow down my cheeks. “I’m… I’m not strong enough to do this again. I can’t have my life torn to pieces again, Carter.”

“I won’t tear your life to pieces,” he promised, his chest rapidly moving now as he stressed his words. “Leah, you have to believe me.”

“You’re asking me to do a big thing, and I’m not ready.”

He froze, gazing at me like his entire world had stopped making sense. “You’re not ready? There’s a strange fucking irony to this, isn’t there?”

“You don’t understand –”

“I do understand! See, I know what you’re feeling. You want to keep me at arm’s length because you’ve been burned real bad. Leah, I understand that. I know what it’s like to be betrayed by someone you love. But closing your heart means letting the best thing that happened to you pass by. It’s the fear of the unknown stopping you. Listen to me when I tell you that I’m not going to make the same mistake again.”

You hear the sense in his words. You understand how serious he’s being. But… you can’t control the twist in the pit of your stomach that tells you to run. That’s what I fought with. He was right. I was scared, and maybe I was being a coward. I was closing my heart up and letting something that might work go.

Love was a gamble, and I’d spent the last three years playing on the safe side, avoiding that gamble with anyone. And by doing so, I avoided the most acute pain possible. What he was asking for was too much.

I just wasn’t ready.

I wasn’t sure I ever would be.

And besides, I wasn’t the girl I was before, willing to take a leap of faith on a man that had stepped back into my world only two days ago. No, that wasn’t possible. He didn’t know what he was talking about. Carter would return and continue his flings with dense giraffes like Molly, and I would salvage my life here after it got torn apart by the fuckers outside the motel room.

He read me like a book, and the disappointment on his face was almost too hard to bear.

“I’m sorry, Carter,” I apologized. “I never expected us to find each other again like this. I imagined something entirely different.”

“You’re making a mistake, Leah,” he whispered to me, a mixture of sadness and anger in his voice. “You really are, and you’re going to let more time go. Time we’ll never have back.”

“This time, we’ll really go our separate ways –”

“You’re the deluded one all along,” he cut in, shaking his head in defeat. “We’ll never move on. How many more years are you going to let pass before you realize this?”