Kiss and Break Up (Magnolia Cove, #1)(61)

My lungs froze, air puffing out of me on a dry exhale. “You’d have known if you’d have listened to me at all these past weeks. I told you I liked him. I told you what we were doing was scaring me.”

“Again, I fucked up. But the thought of you letting him touch you like that,” he said on a harsh exhale, “it tore out my damn heart.”

“Funny, I didn’t realize you even had one.”

“I deserve that.”

I swallowed, my eyes burning as I turned to his tortured expression. He looked like hell, too, but the best kind. His blue eyes were more vivid over the pillows cushioning them, and the careful mess he made of his hair was flattened in ten different ways. His white shirt was crinkled, as were his jeans, and his boots unlaced.

Heat coalesced at the same time hate and hurt wrapped tight around my heart. It didn’t seem fair that standing before me, I was able to finally appreciate everything he was as more than just a friend but also be too wrecked to even want it. “How’d you come to this miraculous realization anyway?”

“That doesn’t matter.” I frowned, because it did, and he took a few steps closer. “I wish I’d made sense of what I was feeling before all this happened. I wish I’d swallowed my pride before I let it get the better of me. I wish I was capable of thinking before I act. I wish for so many things, but wishing is pointless because here I am, unable to make any of them come true.” My tongue felt too thick to talk, so I didn’t. “Freckles, I’m done with wishing. I only want to make this right.”

My eyes closed. They reopened as his hand met my face, his thumb brushing over my skin as he stepped even closer and peered down at me. “I love you. I’ve always loved you. And I don’t know when exactly that love changed, or why it had me acting like more of a dickhead than normal, but I know it wasn’t recent. I know I’d be lying if I tried to say it was all brand new.” His throat bobbed. “Because it’s not new. What’s new is that I can finally recognize what I feel and admit it.”

I felt my heart beating through every limb, every vein, and every breath as I absorbed what he’d just said. “You …” I couldn’t even talk, my vocal cords had become cotton candy—flimsy, unreliable, and too damn soft.

Dash nodded, his thumb reaching my bottom lip and grazing beneath it, eyes tracking the connection. “Yeah, no more bullshit. I’ve always said what I mean and mean what I say.” His lips twitched. “Until it came to admitting how I felt about you. Which says something in and of itself, yeah?”

My lashes drooped to his lip, where a tiny cut still resided from his brawl with Byron. I wanted so badly to absolve him of all that’d happened, but as I stared at that lip, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about Kayla. “You knew you loved me, yet you were okay with having sex with someone else?”

His lips tightened, and his thumb ceased moving. “There’s not a lot I can say besides I’m sor—”

“You’re sorry, yes, we’ve established that. But Dash”—I laughed, backing up and losing his touch—“I couldn’t go any further with Byron because it made me sick. Because I was beginning to think that maybe I was in love with you, too.”

“Peggy, fuck.” His hands balled at his sides. “I want this. Us. More than anything else in the world. And if we could just start over, you know I’d never do that—”

“But I wouldn’t be able to forget.” I squared my shoulders, infusing enough steel to straighten my spine and strengthen my voice. “I can’t forget what it felt like to see you in that bed with her, of all people.”

He came toward me, but I backed away. He stopped, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I-I don’t even know what to say. I was fucked up, and I fucked up, but I’m not the type to wait around for someone to decide they finally want me, Peggy.” A harsh laugh erupted. “I’m the type who’ll fuck someone else to help me forget someone else. And we weren’t together. I never thought we’d speak again.”

Tears dripped, and I flicked them away, my heart squeezing. “While that may be true, it’s all too big a mess now. So there’s really no point in having this conversation.”

“There is,” he ground out through a tight jaw. “There is because we’re us. We couldn’t live without each other even if we didn’t fall for each other, and now we definitely can’t.”

“You didn’t feel that way forty-eight hours ago,” I had to remind him.

He tossed his arms out. “Because I hated your fucking guts forty-eight hours ago. You destroyed me, Peggy. If I’m being honest, knowing you were making out with him, knowing he touched your cunt in that limo is still destroying me.”

I flinched. “See?” Emotion smeared my voice, tainting my vision. “Just go. We’re wasting our time and only making this worse.”

“No time with you is wasted even when we’re breaking.”

My fingers curled, nails striking my palms. “I don’t want to break anymore. I want you to leave.”

“Over Kayla? Come on,” he said. “We’re more than this bullshit.”

How he so easily discarded the pain that he’d caused from his actions had something dark and all-consuming cracking open inside me. “Don’t you dare belittle how I feel.” I was seething, my teeth clacking. “But you would because that’s what you do. You’re Dash Thane, right? The boy who ignores how others feel and does and says whatever he wants, and forever gets away with it.”