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He had haunted her dreams this past month.
The terrible truth was, she had missed him. Even the infuriating things about him.
It would be such a terrible thing to love him.
I feel everything...
His words scraped against a raw part of her soul. She didn’t want to consider that. Didn’t want to think about the possibility that he felt more than everyone else. And that was why he was the way that he was. It was easier to dismiss him when she had convinced herself he wouldn’t care.
But she had been confronted with how very much he did care.
With her own callousness, and her own inability to look at another person and really see them.
How could she accuse him of that when she had done the same? How could she act like he was somehow less able to consider other people when it was clear every person did it all the time.
Everyone made themselves the main character.
She had done the same.
She lay down on her bed, and tried not to weep.
But she did anyway.
She could remember crying piteously the first time she was aware of her parents forgetting her birthday. They’d been on a high with each other and had planned a weekend trip away. She’d been left alone at nine to make her own dinner and put herself to bed.
She’d cried, and no one had been there to care.
She had never wanted to be sad and small and crying because she couldn’t get what she wanted from another person, never again.
But here she was, weeping over a man as impossible as the situation she found herself in.
And she couldn’t escape to Rome, because that’s where he was.
She had been running for a very long time, and she had finally reached the end.
The next morning, when Polly got up, it was late, and Luca was nowhere to be found.
But it was past time for him to be at the office, so it stood to reason that he was there. He was a creature of habit.
She maneuvered around the kitchen, which was relatively familiar to her. It was perhaps childish to demand that he buy a whole new house so that they could avoid each other. She had been angry. Furious.
They were going to have to have a talk, and she was going to have to find a way to be fair. Because she hadn’t been.
She had beaten herself up about that until she had fallen asleep. She knew that she was going to have to bite back a few of the more regrettable things that had come out of her mouth.
She went to his very fancy espresso machine and made herself a coffee. Then she stood at the window, looking out at the city below. It was difficult to fully figure out how she had gotten here.
And yet, it was five years in the making.
Of ignoring feelings for him that had been building, of declining to take care of her sex drive. Yeah. That was the problem. Her latent sex drive. And not the fact that she had been wholly obsessed with Luca.
She gritted her teeth. She had heard of pregnancy hormones making women emotional, but she had never heard of pregnancy hormones forcing women to be brazenly honest with themselves. She didn’t like it.
She sat down on the wide, ridiculously large couch that took up most of his living area. And when the door opened behind her, she nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Luca,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.