Chapter 43
JESSE
Almost as soon as I caught my breath, I knew I shouldn’t have set foot in this hotel room. I didn’t regret what had happened, but it’d been way too easy to fall right back into her—literally—and I couldn’t let that happen.
Well, not more than I already had. I couldn’t just pretend that nothing had changed. I couldn’t lie here in her garden-variety, hotel double suite and act like everything we could be had just evaporated the second the door closed.
I sat bolt upright, immediately swung my legs off the bed, and got up. My shirt was halfway across the room, but my pants were right at my feet. Without looking at her, I bent over, swiped them up, and put them back on without knowing or caring where my underwear had gone.
If I stayed for one more second, I was going to forget why we couldn’t do this, pull her back into my arms, and then fucking cuddle her until kingdom come.
“Jesse?” She said my name just as I was doing up my fly. “Where are you going? Why are you leaving?”
I didn’t turn to face her. I didn’t trust what she’d see if I looked at her. After I finished buttoning up, I strode across the room and picked up my shirt, and only once I’d put my arms in the sleeves did I finally glance at her.
She was sitting up now, the sheets pulled around her chest and her hair a mess, but her features were soft, confusion and vulnerability in her eyes. Maybe even a little hurt.
As soon as it occurred to me that I was causing those emotions, I considered backing down. I could go back to bed and soothe her. I knew all the right words to say. I could reassure her. Maybe even lie and tell her I just had somewhere to be.
In the past, that was exactly what I would’ve done, but I’d kept all of this bottled up for so long. I’d constantly tried to do the right thing by her, thinking that meant I had to be supportive. Give her space. Keep my mouth shut when every instinct I had was screaming at me to do the opposite.
But I was done with that now. Enough was enough, and honestly, I’d had way more than that.
“I’m leaving because I can’t do this,” I said, my voice coming out a sharper than I’d wanted it to, but hey.
Her eyebrows pulled together. “You can’t do what?”
“This,” I repeated, gesturing between us before moving my hands back to my shirt to do up the rest of the buttons. “Whatever the fuck this was supposed to be, I can’t do it.”
She blinked hard, clearly caught off guard. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.” My head shook a few times. I let it drop forward and focused on the floor for a beat, trying to rein it all in. I really did, but I failed. Miserably. “You can’t pull me in like this and then act like it didn’t mean anything tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” She frowned. “Why are we talking about tomorrow when it’s not here yet and how did I pull you in?”
I scoffed, anger, fear, and maybe even a bit of desperation tangling together in the very depths of my soul as I stared back at her. She’d pushed and pushed, but this was my breaking point. I couldn’t keep going like this, and while some of the responsibility belonged to me, a lot of it was hers.
“How did you pull me in? Shit, Jacque. How did you not? I went along with it willingly, sure, but I don’t want to be your fuck buddy.”
It sounded harsher coming out than it had in my head, but I didn’t take it back.
My chest was too tight, everything I’d been holding in finally spilling over.
“I don’t want to be the guy you call when it’s convenient.
I don’t want to be the friend who occasionally falls into bed with you. That’s not what this is for me.”
Her eyes widened slightly, like she hadn’t expected me to say any of this. Too bad.
I’d been patient. I’d tried to wait her out, but she wasn’t coming to her senses. In fact, she felt further away now than ever before. “I want you, Jacqueline. Not just for fun. Not just for now. I want you. Period.”
She swallowed, her grip tightening on the sheet. “I told you, I—”
“Yeah, I get it. You just got out of an eight-year relationship. You want your independence. You think being tied to my family…” I let out a short, humorless laugh.
“Our family is some kind of trap, but stop pretending like I’m the problem here.
Like I’m the one who can’t commit or who’s going to wake up one day and just decide that I’m bored. ”
“I never said that you couldn’t commit.”
“You didn’t have to,” I snapped. “You implied it. Every time you talk about how I’ll ‘move on,’ or how this isn’t sustainable, or how you don’t fit.”
My jaw tightened so much that my teeth started hurting.
“Do you know what that sounds like? It sounds like me. It’s every excuse I’ve ever used to not stick around.
Every reason I’ve ever given for why something wouldn’t work before I even tried.
I’ve spent my whole life being that guy, wishy-washy and uncommitted. Always halfway in, halfway out.”
I let out a breath, shaking my head before I looked at her again. “You’re acting like I used to, making excuses instead of just giving us a try.”
Her lips parted, but before she could get a sound out, I cut over her, needing to get this over with. Now. “I’m in love with you.”
There. I said it. Out loud. No going back now.
“If I can’t openly love you, then I can’t keep doing this, Jacque.” I refused to look away, absolutely done hiding my feelings.
Past me would’ve walked away long before things had gotten this far, but I wasn’t that guy anymore and I wasn’t going to half-ass this. The ball was going into her court. It was time she started making some serious decisions, but only once she had all the relevant information.
In the meantime, she was just staring at me, stunned. I could actually see it happening in real time, the confusion fading into understanding. Like I’d just knocked something loose in her head and she didn’t know what to do with it.
“We talked about this,” she said finally, even sounding like she was reaching.
“No, we didn’t.”
Her eyes snapped to mine. “Yes, we did.”
“No,” I said sharply. “We didn’t talk, Jacque. You did.”
Both of her eyebrows shot up, but I was far from done. Every other time this had come up, it’d been her turn. This time, it was mine. “You told me how you felt and what you thought, and every time I tried to say anything back, you shut me down. That’s not a conversation. It’s a fucking monologue.”
A defensive sort of hardness crept across her features. “That’s not true.”
“What are you so afraid of?” I asked, deciding to just cut straight through the bullshit and get to the point.
I knew her well enough by now to know that this wasn’t about logic or practicality. It was fear, and despite everything I’d learned about her past and what she’d been through, her fear of me was something I still didn’t understand.
Her lips pressed together, like she didn’t want to answer. With my buttons finally done up, I planted my hands on her hips and stared at her. “What is it, Jacque. What has made you so fucking scared that you won’t even try?”
“Don’t,” she snapped, tension breaking loose in her tone. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Don’t act like this is simple,” she shot back. “You know I’m not just overthinking things for no reason.”
“Do I know that? You’re scared, but instead of dealing with it, you’re trying to convince both of us this won’t work before it even has a chance to.”
Her composure cracked, her cheeks flushing. She threw her arms out to her sides and the words burst out of her like bullets. “I’m afraid of never being able to measure up, Jesse!”
I blinked hard, but it was pouring out of her now like a dam had burst.
“Have you even met the people in your family? Do you even hear yourself, pretending that you’re all so normal? Do you even understand what you’re asking me to step into?”
While I had a lot to say about all of that, I didn’t interrupt. She needed to say this and at least she was finally being completely honest. “I’m not going to be like them. I can’t be like them. I wasn’t born into a Fortune 500 company or with a silver spoon shoved up my ass.”
She swallowed hard, tears shimmering in her eyes. “How am I supposed to act like I belong when they’re them and I’m me?”
My heart cracked open, but I already knew there was no point in telling her that, to me, the fact that she was her was exactly what made her so special. Because this was the core of it. For some unknown, unexplainable, insane fucking reason, Jacqueline didn’t think she was worthy.
“I wasn’t the perfect academia wife to Thomas,” she said, her voice cracking slightly. “Even after living like one for almost a decade, I obviously just make the cut.”
I could hear in her voice that that one sliced deeper than the rest, the fact that she’d tried so hard for so long, and he’d still left her the way he had.
Honestly, that was one of the reasons I’d taken it so easy on her until now.
Even though I knew she wasn’t in love with the guy anymore, it had to hurt to be tossed out like yesterday’s trash after you’d spent most of your adult life trying to conform to someone else’s wishes.
“I tried so hard to be what I thought I was supposed to be and look how that turned out.” She brought those shimmering eyes back to mine. “I was barely the perfect girlfriend for you and that was fake.”
“No,” I said immediately.
She shook her head. “Jesse—”
“It was never fake to me. I don’t care how it started. I don’t care what the original plan was. It wasn’t fake. Not for me.” Her eyes searched mine, looking like she was trying to figure out if I was exaggerating, but I just wasn’t. “It isn’t fake now either.”
I let out a long, slow breath, some of the fight draining out of me, but behind it was a much sharper, much more painful emotion. “I love you.”
Her shoulders slumped. “But?”
“But this hurts.” I gestured between us. “I’m not doing it anymore, Jacque. I can’t. It hurts too much.”
I grabbed my jacket and my shoes, not looking at her as I moved toward the door.
“Jesse, don’t go. Please?”
I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t do that, look at her again, see all that vulnerability and hurt, and still walk away, but that was what I needed to do right now.
“Goodbye, Jacque.” I murmured, then reached for the door, opened it, and left, knowing I was doing the right thing but somehow feeling worse than I ever had.
For the first time in my life, I’d said it. I’d told a girl that I was in love with her and it still hadn’t been enough. At this point, I honestly wasn’t sure anything would be.