Chapter 27
Connor
“Connor?” Tai’s voice is soft, his face pressed into my chest.
“Yeah, sweetheart?” I bury my nose in his hair, inhaling deeply and allowing the comforting scent to calm me to my very core. I drop a kiss on his head as I wait.
“Can we talk?”
My pulse speeds to a gallop as I hug him against me. “I would love nothing more.”
He’s quiet as he gathers his thoughts, then dives straight in. No warning, no lifejacket, not even time for a deep breath as he plunges right into the hardest question.
“Why did you leave?”
“I was scared,” I admit. “You told me from the beginning that our relationship had an expiration date. Your expectations were crystal clear, but they didn’t stop me from catching feelings.
If we’re telling the truth, I caught feelings before anything physical happened.
I knew your stance, and I tried to follow your rules. ”
“Those fucking rules,” he mutters.
“I tried to respect what you wanted, but I wanted more. When I started falling for you, I should’ve backed off, but I didn’t. I just handed you my heart, knowing I’d leave that place without it.”
“I was going to stop you,” Tai whispers, burrowing his face into my shirt. “That night… the night you left, I came out of the shower to tell you I wanted to drop the pretenses and give us a real shot. That I thought we could be something.”
A sad smile pulls at my lips as emotion swells in my throat. “That’s just it, though, Tai. You thought we could be something, and I thought we already were.”
He whines my name, fingers clenching around my shirt as he takes a few intentional inhales. Once his breathing regulates, he sighs. “You still left.”
“I did,” I whisper, unable to stop the crack in my voice. “But I came back.”
His dark eyes snap up to mine. “What?”
I run my hand over his hair, soaking in the unfamiliar sensation of the shorter strands between my fingers. “Walking away was a mistake. I know that now… hell, I knew it then. As soon as that door closed behind me, I regretted it. I was just so fucking scared. Things between us were so…”
“Perfect,” he finishes for me.
I force a swallow and nod. “It felt too good, like we were waiting for the other shoe to drop and show us we could never work. Maybe we lived too far apart, or our separate lives could never mesh.”
“And then I didn’t give you the chance to find out when I refused to talk about any of it,” he says quietly.
“You were so closed off about your life outside of that bubble we were in. I tried to accept it for what it was, but I couldn’t.
We’d turned into something that could’ve been, and I wanted more than that.
I was afraid you’d reject me, tell me I was being naive and ridiculous, so instead of telling you I wanted a real chance at a relationship, I ran before you could hurt me. ”
He nuzzles into my chest but doesn’t say a word.
“It only took me an hour, maybe an hour and a half tops, before I turned around. When I made it back to the resort, you were already gone. The lady at the desk said you’d just checked out. It was too late.”
“I sat in that parking lot for an hour waiting for you before I drove off,” Tai says quietly. “We barely missed each other.”
“If I’d turned around sooner—”
“If I would’ve let us be real with each other—”
Our eyes meet, both of them heavy with what the distance has done to us.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” I say after a long stretch of silence, “so I drove home. I thought time would help me realize how irrational I was being, but it only got worse. I just… fucking missed you.”
His fingers tighten in my shirt and he nods. “I missed you too. I called you.”
My brows furrow. “You did?”
“About a week after you left. A woman—Beth—answered, and said she was your wife.”
Puzzle pieces click together in my mind, the full picture finally forming. “You assumed I’d been having an affair.”
“Yeah,” he admits. “I thought I’d been a fling, and that was why you were so eager to leave after things went as far as they did.”
“Fuck, I’m sorry,” I whisper, filled with regret as I close my eyes and press my head against his, squeezing him until it’s probably too tight.
“Beth is my ex, but she’s a great person.
We were actually talking about you that day.
She’s really the only person I’ve come out to or talked about any of this stuff with.
I needed advice on how to fix what I’d done.
She set me straight—told me to stop being an idiot and call you.
It’s what finally gave me the push to do it. ”
“You never called me.”
“I did,” I argue. “Someone else answered and told me off, then told me never to contact you again. When I tried to call back, my number was blocked.”
Tai stares at me, unseeing, before he pulls his phone out of his pocket and taps at the screen. The confusion on his face morphs to rage, and he scrambles off my lap and sprints toward the door.
“Tai?” I shout, jumping to my feet and reaching for him, but he’s already gone.