CHAPTER 56
harley
Ihad never told Maverick that I loved him. That single fact weighed heavily on me as I watched his truck drive away. Try as I might, I couldn’t get it out of my head.
“I never wanted you, and I never will.”
The words that had haunted me for six years were a lie.
A fucking lie. What was I supposed to do with that?
I’d built my survival over the past six years around those words until they were practically carved into my bones.
If he never wanted me, then moving on made sense.
If he never loved me, then I could write everything off as a big mistake.
But if he loved me?
And if he loved me and still walked away like it meant nothing?
Then what the hell did that make me? Make us?
Whatever it was, it made me brash because I grabbed my phone and sent him the kind of text I had no business sending. My thumb hovered over the send button for a full thirty seconds, my heart thundering in my chest, before I hit it.
For what it’s worth… I never said it back then, but I never stopped loving you either.
I sat at the island in the kitchen, just staring at the message as I waited for some kind of reply.
Minutes passed without a response. I wasn’t sure what I expected.
An immediate response was unlikely. Maverick and I were in uncharted waters, fighting history and too many feelings.
Did I really think he would text me back so readily after what he’d said?
Was I really thinking at all?
“Fuck,” I let out as I dropped my phone and ran my hands over my face.
What the hell was I doing? Flirting with something I shouldn’t want and couldn’t have was dangerous. Especially considering that I was technically married.
The word felt foreign every time I applied it to myself.
Married.
What I had… it wasn’t a real marriage. It was so cold and clinical.
A calculated decision based on benefits.
It was a prison—one I’d undoubtedly built for myself.
I didn’t love Vivienne. Hell, I didn’t even like her.
I didn’t want this life with her, but I understood the point of our relationship logically.
Every part of it was carefully debated and decided on like a business merger.
And that was before a baby was factored into the situation. A baby that was just another clinical decision I borderline resented. Even though it was the next logical step in our growth, I wasn’t sure I wanted kids.
Or maybe I had just convinced myself that it made sense.
I didn’t even know anymore.
I just knew that I was drowning. Every day felt like I was holding my breath underwater, smiling through it all so no one would notice the panic tearing me apart from the inside out.
I’d spent my whole life being maneuvered—by my parents, my grandfather, by expectations, by reputation, and now by Vivienne.
And then there was Maverick…
For the first time in a long time, I felt like I could breathe again. Even if it was just to have another panic attack, at least it was something. I could feel again. The world wasn’t so numbing when he was around.
When he looked at me, it was unfiltered. It wasn’t strategic, and he wasn’t assessing my value. It was raw and messy. It was dangerous.
I should’ve been mad at him. I should’ve hated him. He’d used me to get to my family and used me as a punching bag instead of talking to me. But I’d spent my whole life being hurt by people who were supposed to love me. It was so on par for the course that it borderline made sense to me.
At least with him, the pain came with tenderness.
It came with laughter and jokes, dirt bikes and seashells.
It came with gentle kisses and soft touches.
With Maverick, love was worth the pain. Was one awful moment in our past enough to outweigh all the good ones?
Or was I just rewriting history because I couldn’t survive believing that I’d lost the only person who ever chose me without obligation?
Maybe that was what love was. A convoluted, endless cycle of being hurt and hurting someone.
Maybe this was just how it was supposed to be.
He hurt me, I hurt him, we move on. Except we never really moved on, did we?
We just stacked new lives on top of old wounds and tried to pretend like the foundation wasn’t cracked.
I just wanted the good again. Was that too much to ask for? I wanted the version of us before we were manipulated and torn apart. Before prison and marriage contracts. Before I learned how to lie so well that I almost believed myself.
The existence of something between us was a delusion I needed more than I needed the breath in my lungs.
My life without him was inevitable, and I didn’t want to think about that.
But all of it hung on Maverick not leaving me on read.
Which he did. My phone screen dimmed in front of me.
No bubbles. No response. My message remained out there, ignored and exposed, just like I felt.