CHAPTER 64
harley
Iwas so screwed up in the head. What the hell was wrong with me? What was I doing? There was no way any version of this with Maverick ended well. At least, not that I could envision.
I could picture all the ways it’d blow up in my face.
I could picture the fallout with Vivienne, especially considering we were trying to have a kid.
It didn’t matter that she was fucking her golf instructor.
There were just things I wasn’t allowed to do.
I was aware of the double standard, but it hadn’t been an issue in the past. I could picture all the ways it’d hurt Maverick when he finally found out I was lying to him.
When he genuinely believed I was choosing him in a life we could finally have together.
That should’ve been more than I needed to run away—to leave him alone and never come back.
That’d be the right thing to do. That’d be the smart thing.
But I’d spent my whole life doing the smart thing. I’d done everything I was supposed to do. I married the woman I hated. I took over the company I didn’t want. I lived in the city I couldn’t stand. And now I was trying to have a kid that I wasn’t sure was a good idea.
All of it got me nowhere. I was miserable. I didn’t want to do the smart thing. I didn’t want to do the logical thing. I wanted to do whatever I wanted. I just wanted to be happy. Was that really such a bad thing? Why did it have to matter how I did it?
Because this was Maverick.
That was why. This wasn’t some baseless escape like my wife’s golf instructor. This wasn’t someone I didn’t know. Maverick was the only person who had ever made me feel alive and calm. This was the only person I had ever loved.
This whole thing was a convoluted mess that I didn’t know how to fix. It consumed every corner of my mind in an ugly, obsessive kind of way. Every touch felt like a countdown to disaster. It hadn’t even been two days, and I already knew the fallout of this would ruin us. Ruin me.
Because I chose him, and I’d keep choosing him.
My body recognized him like muscle memory.
Being with him was as easy as breathing, even if my pending doom lurked on the horizon.
Every question I had about attraction came rushing back to me.
I wasn’t surprised I wasn’t attracted to Vivienne—I never had been—but in six years with the hundreds of people I’d met, no one made me feel the way Maverick did.
It was all so confusing.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Maverick asked over dinner, his voice cutting through the anxious spiral building inside me.
“What?” I blinked as I glanced up at him. How long had he been talking?
His eyes were on me, searching and concerned.
We sat in a quiet corner at The Lakeside Reverie for that dinner I’d negotiated out of him.
After the clinic yesterday, I went back to my mother’s house while he took Roxy home.
I got blow-by-blow updates from him via text about the whole thing, which kept me out of my head most of the night until I fell asleep.
That didn’t help keep me busy during the day, but at least this dinner was something to look forward to.
If I could get my head out of my ass long enough to enjoy it.
At least I’d found a way to keep Vivienne off my back for a while, but it wasn’t hard to satiate her with the right gift—a spa weekend, an expensive vacation, a new set of never-to-be-used golf clubs for the golf lessons she never used, and so on.
She’d be preoccupied for a while. It wasn’t a trick I could use often, but it wasn’t the first time I’d used quiet bribery to get my wife to back down for a while.
The only perk to being married to me was my money, after all.
“You’re a million miles away, princess,” he whispered. “What can I do to help?”
“I’m sorry,” I replied. I ran my hands over my face and pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes. Focusing on deep breaths, I tried to recenter myself. Date night was supposed to be a good thing.
I wasn’t supposed to be on this date.
Maverick’s fingers brushed over my forearm, and I peeked out from behind my hands.
He offered a small, reassuring smile. He was so damn handsome it almost hurt.
For the first time, I wasn’t the only one dressed up.
He wore a dress shirt with his jeans, and I realized just how much I loved the color red on him.
The dim lights in the restaurant only played with the contours on his face, sharpening his features and intensifying every micro-expression in those stormy eyes.
“We can go home,” he offered. “Or I can drop you off at home and leave you alone.”
I didn’t deserve this man.
“No.” I shook my head. I didn’t want that, considering this whole thing was my idea. “No. I’m sorry. Life’s just...”
“A lot?” he finished for me.
“Yeah.” That was one way of putting it. Pushing my plate away, I sat back in the chair and crossed my arms. I wasn’t all that hungry anyway. I never was.
“Tell me one thing going on in that pretty head of yours,” Maverick said. “Just say the first thing that comes to mind.”
“I love you,” I replied. That was the very first thing that I could think of.
“I know.” I liked the smile that lit up his face as he said it.
“I just... sometimes I wish I’d never left,” I admitted. “When we were kids... it would’ve been reckless and probably a disaster, but... all I can think of is that we’d be happy. At least, happier than we are now.”
Granted, that wasn’t a hard feat to accomplish. Pretty much anything was happier than I was right now.
“I’m happy in this moment, Harley,” he said. Oh, how I wished I were. “Yeah, there’s a lot of bullshit in my life, but I’m happy. There’s bad, but there’s good. You have to learn how to take the bad with the good, and then you just learn how to navigate the in-between.”
I stared at him because what? I could hear the words coming out of him, but it didn’t feel like him talking at all.
“You sound like a motivational poster,” I told him.
“Yeah.” He chuckled. Shifting, he pulled his wallet out of his pocket. “My sponsor has a thing for motivational posters. He tried to give me this big poster with this comical cat on it, but there was no fucking way I was putting that thing anywhere. So, he made me this.”
He handed me a black metal business card. I took it and read it.
You are not what happened to you.
You are what you choose to become after.
I ran my thumb over the engraved words. Something slowly tightened in my chest as I reread them. Once. Twice. Three times. Each time, the words seem to cut deeper, etching into my bones.
Swallowing hard, I handed it back to him.
“I can’t change what happened to me,” Maverick said quietly as he took it back. “I can’t make it suck less or make the bad days go away. All I can do is remember the good things and navigate the in-between.”
Just navigate the in-between.
He made it sound so much simpler than it was. What if the in-between was nothing but dark waters and heavy tides dragging you under? What if the in-between was full of pain and misery? What if you couldn’t find the good? What if the in-between wasn’t worth navigating?
“What are your good things?” I asked, desperately needing something to pull me out of my head. I latched hard onto the deep tones of his voice.
“Right now… you,” he replied. “And I… bought a house.”
“Really?” I failed to hide my surprise, making him laugh.
“I know, me? A house owner,” Maverick said. “To be fair, it’s a disaster of a house. I’ll be fixing it for years.”
“But it’s yours.”
“Yeah, it’s mine.” The look of pride on his face was one I oddly envied. I’d never had it work so hard for anything in my life, so I couldn’t imagine how he felt. I wished I could, though.
“Can I see it?”
“Uh…” He let out an awkward laugh that was adorable. “As long as you know that it’s a complete disaster. I’ve got a lot of work to do for it to be decent.”
“I don’t mind if you don’t.” I could understand if he didn’t want to show me. With hopes of swaying him, I added, “Though you have seen my current mess.”
“Okay. If you’re sure. It’s not that big a deal.”
“It is because it’s yours,” I told him. Perhaps it was silly, but I meant it. I wanted whatever little parts of Maverick that I could get. I wanted to cling to them as long as I could.
I knew this wasn’t sustainable, and I knew it was incredibly selfish.
But logic stopped mattering where Maverick was involved.
It was hard to think about the consequences when a single touch from him could bring me more peace than anything else in my life.
I hadn’t realized just how starved I was for it until I found it with him. How pathetic was that?