Worth the Risk(97)

Not when he frames the sides of my face with his hands.

Choose me.

His lips press kisses against the tracks my tears have left.

His lips meet mine in the sweetest of ways.

Choose me.

Then his hands remain on my cheeks, his forehead rests on mine, and his breath feathers over my lips.

“I’m fucked up, Sidney. And I’m going to keep fucking up. I’m man enough to admit my pride is in the way and I need to sort it out. I need to fix myself or else it isn’t fair to drag you into my life more than I have. It isn’t right for me to attach blame to you when you don’t deserve it. I thought I’d gotten over what she’d done . . . and then your first fuck-up, I call you her name. That isn’t fair to you.” He kisses me oh so softly as my tears fall. “I love you. I think that’s why I fought you so hard. All along, I knew I would fall, and yet, I can’t ask you to stay. I can’t tell you I’ll be perfect. I can’t give you the things that you need to thrive. I have to let you go. It’s going to fucking kill me, but I can’t hold you back here. I can’t clip your wings.”

Ask me to stay.

My shoulders shudder as I fight back the sobs. This tenderness—his tenderness—is too much when I feel like this is our goodbye. I thought I had two more weeks to prepare for this. I thought I’d be able to change his mind even though my mind hadn’t been made up yet.

It is now.

And now he’s pushing me away.

“You deserve so much more than I can give you, Princess.”

For whatever reason, that term—the one he’s always used as a dig but is now used as an endearment—undoes me, makes my bottom lip quiver.

But I want you.

Makes tears fall harder.

“Once you step away from here . . . once you go back to your city and your sidewalks and your nightlife, you’ll see that you missed it all. You’ll know that you’d be settling if you stay here. And you . . . I don’t want you ever to settle.”

My lips find his again. My hands need to touch him. My body needs to feel his against mine—in mine . . . one last time.

Because this is goodbye.

I know it. It’s inevitable.

He knows it. I can feel it in his touch.

Choose me.

So, we make love on the balcony. We make love in the moonlight. We whisper apologies. We groan sweet nothings. But we make no promises.

And later, when he walks me to my car as I fight back the tears, and he presses yet another bittersweet kiss onto my lips, I know this is over.

I could fight. For him. For us. For more. But unless he wants to fight, too, it’s useless.

Maybe he’s right.

Maybe I’m so caught up in the moment I’ve lost sight of everything else.

Maybe he’s right and I’m wrong.

And that’s what hurts the most.





“Hold up. What’s going on here?” Rissa asks and props her hands on her hips as her eyes narrow on the half-filled cardboard box on my desk.

“Just packing up.”

“You’re really leaving, just like that?”

The tone of her voice has nothing on the stabbing pains I feel everywhere in my body and my tear ducts that have run dry.

“Not just like that.” I fake indifference. “The contest has one week left. I’m going to head back and facilitate some final PR stuff from the main office. I’ll have more help there, people with better connections, etcetera.”

“The same kind of people you can pick up a phone from here and ask for the same kind of thing? Those kind of people, right?”

I don’t answer her, and I don’t try to pretend that I don’t hear the anger in her voice. She deserves to be mad at me. I’m bailing on her because I can’t handle being in this town another day knowing Grayson is somewhere close. Knowing that he’s pushing me away and I don’t know how else to fight.

“Yeah. That kind of people.”

“I love you, honey, but I call bullshit. Are you really going to tuck that pretty little tail of yours between your legs and run away without a fight?”

“I did fight, Rissa. I tried. You can’t make someone love you in return.”

I love you, Sidney. I can hear his voice. I can feel his lips. I can feel his love.

And yet . . . he won’t ask me to stay.

“He loves you, all right. He’s just scared,” she says, and I whip my eyes up to look at her. “Anyone who has ever been within a ten-foot radius of the two of you has seen it. Why do you think rumors still fly even though you two go through painful steps to look like you’re not seeing each other? Hell, just the way he walks by here and then stands in front of that window, waiting for you to look his way for a whole five seconds’ worth of eye-fucking tells me all I need to know.”

“Well.” I cough out the word, a little surprised by her vernacular. I’m also vaguely saddened that it’s obvious to everyone else how Grayson feels about me but he can’t see it himself.

Correction. He can see it. He just doesn’t want to believe it.

“So, that’s it? The girl who came here with the determination to do whatever it took to fulfill herself professionally and win the Haute job is just going to lie down without a fight and not fulfill herself personally?”