Chapter Twenty-Two
A SMART GIRL WOULD have quit at the first cold morning. But a smart girl also knows the difference between a man who doesn't want you and a man who wants you so badly he's gone to war with himself over it, and I'd bet my last dollar my Maximo is the second kind.
So...when a week goes by, and things still don't feel right between us...
A cheap trick it is.
"I have a reshoot," I tell him, planting myself in the kitchen where he can't leave without going through me. "The kiss scene. They want it again next week, and I'm rusty, and I need—" I make myself hold his eyes and not blink. "A lesson."
For a second I'm sure he'll say no.
For a second I'd almost rather he did.
Then something in all that cold gives, one hairline crack, and he sets his glass down without a sound, and his voice comes out rough and quiet and done fighting.
"One."
He kisses me like a man breaking a fast he swore he'd keep.
There's no lesson in it, no counting, no careful distance, and I stop pretending there ever was.
My back finds the counter. His hands find my waist and then they don't stay there, they map me like he's memorizing something he's about to lose, and I'm pulling him closer by the shirt and he's letting me and the whole cold week burns off in the space of a single breath—
Then he freezes.
I feel it happen. I feel the exact instant the man comes back into his own body and sees where his hands are and hates it, and he tears himself off me and backward, breathing hard, three feet of kitchen and two years of grief slammed back down between us.
His gaze collides with mine, and I just...
"I don't have a reshoot," I choke out. I can't do it anymore. I can't bear to keep pretending everything's okay, and—
"I know."
Apparently, I never had to in the first place.
"It's late. You should go to bed."
So why then?
I can feel my borrowed heart breaking as I watch him leave without looking back. He just walks away like he's fine about me not being fine, and if I have a problem with that, I can just go, and he'd be fine with that, too.