Chapter 40
Grayson
The door to the kitchen swings shut behind Cole, Maddox, and Zoe, and the silence that follows feels heavier than anything Cole just said.
For a second, I don’t move. I just stand there, staring at her like if I look away, she’ll disappear again.
Carly doesn’t speak either. Her arms are folded tight across her chest like she’s holding herself together, her fingers clutching the ends of her sleeves, knuckles pale.
I notice the shaking almost immediately — small, barely-there tremors in her hands — but her chin is lifted, her shoulders squared.
Her guard is up, and it hurts that I’m the one who put it there.
“Hi,” I say finally, the single word coming out rough.
Her lips part like she’s going to respond, then close again. She swallows, nods once. “Hi.”
That’s it. That’s all we’ve got after four weeks.
I drag a hand over the back of my neck, feeling the five or six feet between us press in.
“I…” I stop, reset, force myself to do this properly. “I’m… so sorry.”
Her expression flickers, but she doesn’t interrupt.
“I’m sorry for the wedding. For not letting you speak. For—” I shake my head, searching for the right words and hating that everything that comes to mind feels insufficient. “For deciding what I thought happened and not giving you the chance to tell me what actually did.”
Her throat moves when she swallows. The shaking in her hands gets worse for a second before she tucks them tighter into her sleeves.
I take a step closer, careful, like she might bolt. “I'm able to listen now,” I say quietly. “I’d like to, if you’ll let me.”
She looks at me then, really looks at me, like she’s trying to figure out if this is real. “Okay,” she says cautiously.
So she tells me.
She tells me about the lease, about signing it right after I kissed her that first time and then acted like it didn’t mean anything. She tells me about thinking she’d pushed too far, that I’d fire her, that the whole thing would implode and she’d be left with nowhere to go.
“I panicked,” she says, her voice steady in a way that somehow makes it worse. “I needed a backup plan. Something I could control if everything else went to shit. Especially after I lost a place to live when Aaron and I split.”
She tells me about keeping it because she’d already signed, because breaking a lease costs money she didn’t have yet, because it felt stupid to undo it immediately when she didn’t know what was going to happen between us.
“But I was going to break it,” she says, her voice breaking just a little. “When things… changed. When this stopped feeling temporary.”
My chest tightens.
She laughs softly, but there’s nothing in it. “I looked into it. The fees. The penalties. I was going to eat it because it didn’t matter anymore.”
I close my eyes for half a second, feeling the weight of how badly I fucked up.
“I didn’t tell you,” she continues, “because I didn’t think it mattered anymore. And then everything got… bigger, and you saw that text before I could do anything about it.”
She shifts her weight, her arms tightening across her chest.
“That’s it. That’s the whole story. There’s nothing else behind it.”
Silence stretches between us, and I can hear my own pulse in my ears.
Every moment replays in my head with brutal clarity — the text, the timing, the way she said yes, but, the way I cut her off before what followed the but ever had a chance to exist.
My stomach turns. My chest howls. And I feel like the biggest fucking idiot in the world.
“I’m so sorry,” I say again, quieter this time, because the first one wasn’t enough and neither is this one. “I panicked, Carly. Half because I was worried about what that meant for Pen, and half because of my past, and I know that’s not right or fair to you.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“I was afraid.”
Her brows knit together slightly, like she wasn’t expecting that.
“I know that’s not a great excuse,” I add. “But it’s the truth.”
I drag a hand through my hair, pacing once before I can stop myself, then forcing myself to stay still.
“My parents split when I was in high school,” I say, swallowing down the discomfort in my throat. “Right when everything else was starting to matter. Scholarships, games, college. They hated each other by then. Couldn’t even sit in the same stands for my games without it turning into a fight."
She watches me like she’s waiting for that to make sense.
“They wrecked each other. And it… It did something to me,” I admit. “Made me think that if they couldn’t make it work, then what was the point of trying? What was the point of caring about anyone enough to let them get close enough to wreck you?”
Carly is very still now.
“So I didn’t. Not really. I dated, slept around, kept everything surface-level because that was easier than dealing with the fallout when things inevitably went wrong.”
I meet her eyes.
“Then I met Halsey.”
Something flickers across her face. I force myself to push through it.
“I thought she was different. Thought she was real. Turns out she was just… better at hiding what she wanted out of it.”
I cringe at my own words, hating that I'm bringing her up even now, but I can't just pretend she didn't reinforce my idea of relationships.
“I got burned,” I say simply. “Bad enough that the only thing I trusted after that was Penelope. She’s the only person I’ve ever loved where it didn’t feel like there was a catch.”
My throat tightens.
“And then there was you.”
The words hang there in the space between us, heavy and unavoidable.
“You walked into my house and you were… real. Annoying as hell sometimes, but real. You didn’t want anything from me except space and respect. And I couldn’t avoid how much I wanted you.”
Her lips twitch, just barely.
“And somewhere along the line,” I continue, “you got past my walls, past the bullshit, past the part of me that kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
I swallow, my jaw working, trying to form the right words.
“So when I saw that text, I thought the shoe dropped. And I fucked everything up.”
Silence fills the space between us again, and I don’t fill it. I let her sit with it, let her decide what to do with everything I just handed her.
Finally, she exhales, low and slow.
“Thank you,” she says quietly.
The words catch me off guard.
“For telling me that,” she clarifies.
Something in my chest loosens a fraction, but then it tightens again almost immediately.
Because her eyes are wet.
Because her arms are still wrapped around herself.
Because there’s distance in her tone now that wasn’t there before.
“But,” she says, her voice breaking just enough to crack something open in me, “that doesn’t change what you thought of me.”
I go still.
“You believed that about me,” she rasps, tears spilling over now, unchecked. “You believed I could do that to you, to Penelope, like it was nothing.”
My heart pounds hard, panic shooting through me. “Carly—”
She shakes her head, cutting me off. “No. Please let me finish.”
I shut my mouth even though every part of my body is screaming to open it again.
She draws in a shaky breath. “I understand why you were afraid. I do. But I can’t be with someone who looks at me and assumes the worst of me the second something doesn’t make sense.”
Each word lands like a hit.
“I tried to explain,” she says. “I tried, and you didn’t let me. And then you shut me out completely like I didn’t matter enough to hear me out.”
“I know,” I say hoarsely. “I know, and I’m—”
“I don’t think I can do that again,” she cuts in, her voice breaking harder now. “I don’t think I can live waiting for the next time something goes wrong and you decide I’m the bad guy without hesitation.”
My chest caves in. “Sweetheart, please don’t do this.”
She wipes at her face with the heel of her hand, but the tears keep coming.
“I love you,” she says, and the sound of those words passing her lips makes me want to vomit when she says it like that.
“That’s why this hurts so much. But I can’t…
I c-can’t put myself in a position where I have to prove again that I’m not lying or using you or whatever else your brain decides in the moment. ”
I take a step toward her. She steps back. It’s small, barely anything, but it feels like a door slamming.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I can’t do this.”
“Carly—”
She turns away from me, her hands unfolding as she grabs the door.
“No,” I say, louder now, panic punching through the shock. “Carly, wait—”
The bell above the door jingles as she pushes it open.
Cold air rushes in, and she doesn’t stop. I try, fully, to get myself to go after her, but my throat is closing, my head spinning, and I don’t know if she’d want that or if it would only make everything worse.
Before I can make a call, I hear the door open in the back, hear footsteps and the sound of my name, but it feels so far away that I'm not sure if it's even real.
She left. She didn’t let me fix this. I heard her out, and she didn't—
“What happened?” someone asks. “Gray?”
I just stand there, staring at the door like she might come back if I hurt badly enough. But I'm hurting worse than I ever have, so why isn’t that enough? Why can’t I be enough?
I don’t understand. I don’t, I don’t know how to, I don’t know if I want to, I just want her, and her, and her, and her, and her—
“Hey, hey, man, sit down.”
Something touches my knees, and my body falls into a chair, but I barely feel it.
“Why would she leave?”
“Fuck.”
“I’ll talk to her.”