Coming Home(87)

Confusion. Rejection. Embarrassment. Resignation.

As she entered her apartment and walked straight back to her bedroom, she was certain of two things: she had feelings for Danny, and his issues went far deeper than she initially thought.

In another time, in another life, she may have been able to tough this out with him, to ride out the storm and let him figure himself out while she sat on the sidelines, rolling with the punches and taking a few hits every now and then. But Leah knew she didn’t have it in her to do that now. She promised herself that she would never let a guy screw her around again, and while she knew Danny and Scott weren’t even close to being cut from the same cloth, the bottom line was, he obviously wasn’t ready for what she wanted.

The back and forth, the push and pull, the mixed signals—she had thought they were past all that after their conversation last weekend, but apparently that wasn’t the case. And she valued herself too much to be treated that way, even if she knew it wasn’t coming from someplace malicious. She wouldn’t allow herself to settle for something less than what she wanted, or to wait around hoping for something she might never get.

Life was too short, and she’d already wasted so much time.

Holly had been right; she had gone too fast with Danny. There were things he needed to figure out, broken pieces of his life he needed to fix. And she needed to walk away and allow him to do it. It would be best for both of them at this point. And maybe when he figured everything out, when he could give her one hundred percent of himself, they could try again.

Leah kicked off her shoes and pulled the blanket up over herself, not even bothering to change out of her clothes.

She knew what it felt like to care about him, what it felt like to want him so badly it erased all rational thought from her mind.

And as she closed her eyes, she began dreading what it would feel like to miss him.





He couldn’t believe he was doing this.

Danny closed his eyes and shook his head as he grabbed the pen, scribbling down Leah’s address before he closed the lid on his laptop.

It was bad enough to look up a girl’s address online, but to do it so he could show up at her place uninvited? It didn’t get much creepier than that.

He ran both hands down his face as he exhaled, because in the past twenty-four hours, he’d managed to be both a tease and an *, so creep wasn’t really that far of a stretch.

He had texted her twice last night after his initial apology, once asking her to let him know she made it home okay, and the other a few hours later, asking if he could call her in the morning so they could talk. She hadn’t answered either one, and he’d gotten the worst sleep of his life because of it.

He just wanted to explain what had happened the night before. Even if she decided she never wanted to speak to him again, she still deserved an explanation.

He’d already had plans to go in to work late that morning, but now he was debating going in at all. It wasn’t just the fact that he was exhausted—he could work through that. It was because he was completely miserable, and he didn’t feel like dealing with Jake or Tommy or anyone else who would try to get to the bottom of what was up with him.

Instead, he spent the morning lying on his couch, running through all the ways he could have handled things differently last night. He’d heard the saying hindsight was twenty-twenty, but that wasn’t accurate.

Hindsight was a stupid motherf*cking *.

At around ten o’clock, his phone went off with a text message, and despite the hours he spent warning himself not to get his hopes up, he couldn’t help but feel defeated when he read her words. She told him she wasn’t mad at him, but she just needed some space—that it would be best for both of them if they took a break for a while.