So I don’t look at her mouth or her face anymore. I gently tug off one sturdy boot from her foot, then the other. I peel away her thick, fuzzy socks, and she sighs in her sleep. Her toes wiggle.
Then I lift the blanket and slide it up her body, resting it at her shoulders, forbidding myself to touch her any more than I already have.
Another sigh leaves her, then she mutters, “Topher.”
I stare down at her, telling myself to leave, hating myself as I stay right beside her bed and say, “Yes, Kate.”
She licks her lips, flails her arm in her sleep, and rolls onto her bad shoulder, not even wincing. I’m worried she’ll hurt herself, sleeping with the sling, so I bend over her and carefully undo the Velcro holding it together. Then I reach behind her and slip it off her body.
Kate’s sigh gusts across my face. “S’nice,” she mumbles. And then she slides her hand across the sheets until it finds mine.
Her eyes flutter open, slow blinks, her gaze unfocused. Her smile is soft and so impossibly sweet. “S’you,” she whispers.
I nod, words lost to me.
Her smile dissolves. “I forgot,” she says, her eyes drifting shut.
Don’t ask her, I tell myself. Don’t ask her. Don’t ask her—
“Forgot what?”
“That you hate me,” she whispers.
My heart cracks and spills aching, sour regret. I despise myself so much. “Never, Kate. I swear.”
“You do,” she says, her mouth pulling in a frown, the tiniest sparkle at the inside corners of her eyes.
The crack in my heart becomes a clean break. Tears. They’re tears.
“I never . . .” I swallow roughly. “I never wanted you to think I hated you, Kate, I . . .” My voice dies off. Another snore lifts her ribs. She’s asleep.
And, like a coward, I tell her what I don’t have the courage to say while she’s awake.
“All I’ve ever wanted is for you to hate me. I couldn’t hate you if I wanted to. I wish I could, but I can’t.” My thumb slides along the smooth, warm skin of her hand. “I don’t know how to do this, so all I’ve ever tried is not to—not to see you or touch you or think about you, because I can’t . . .”
She exhales shakily, curling in on her side, as if protecting herself, shielding herself from me. Those pleas to make peace that have been thrown my way by our friends and family are pebbles to the landslide of her tears, her hand clutching mine, her truth that’s slipped between the cracks of her awareness.
She thinks I hate her.
It’s the last thing I ever wanted. I have never loathed myself so much.
“I’ll fix it,” I tell her, gently tucking behind her ear a hair that’s caught in the tears wetting her cheek. “I promise, Kate, I’ll fix it.”
I know she’s asleep, but her silence feels damning, skeptical, a warning that nothing but a long, hard struggle lies ahead.
I meant what I said, when I told her that I don’t know how to do this, how to share a world with Kate without disdain safely wedged between us, without distance maintained by living an ocean apart.
But that’s not enough to stop me, not anymore.
I can’t—I cannot—live in a world where Kate believes, even if she only reveals it in her most unguarded moments, that I hate her. I can’t let tears wet her eyes and that ache of heart-deep pain pinch her expression. I can’t live with myself, knowing I hurt her.
And now I have to fix it.
I know walking that tightrope of healing what I’ve broken without bonding us together won’t be easy. I won’t even try to tell myself otherwise. But I’m goddamn Christopher Petruchio. Nothing stops me. Every part of my life, when I’ve set my mind to something—in my work, in the kitchen, in sparring, in my bed—I haven’t settled until I’ve come as damn close to perfection as is humanly possible.
Forcing each step back toward her doorway, out of her room, I tell myself what I’m about to undertake won’t be any different. It can’t be.
Because if it is, I am in some deep shit.
? ELEVEN ?
Kate
Waking up is offensive. My head pounds. A sharp ache pounds between my thighs, too. Not for the first time since coming home, I’m hungover and horny—my personal hell.
Shuffling from my room to the kitchen, I squint miserably against the sun.
“And here I thought I had it rough,” Bea says.
I jump a foot and spin toward the sound of her voice, tripping on the coffee table, stumbling back and landing on the armchair in a cloud of dust motes. “You scared me.”