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“He thought it was a kind saying, I think, a reminder to remember who I was. But now, I think…I think he saw me outgrowing him. I think he wanted me to stay quiet.”

The sound echoes in my brain.Shhh.“I want to kill him. I actually want to commit a crime and murder this man for hurting you.”

Reese laughs softly. “Don’t you dare. He’s the guy who’d sue you for trying. Wouldn’t be worth ruining your life over.” She blinks, but her eyes aren’t focused on me. She’s looking at the past.

Suddenly, so am I.

“Reese,” I say. “I never said I was sorry for what I did to you back then.”

Now her eyes snap to mine. She purses her lips. “Yes, you did, Eli. But it’s water under the bridge.”

“No, it’s not. You were pissed at me before all this. And I deserved it.”

Reese scrunches her nose, rolling onto her back. “You’re right. I was pissed then. But I’ve thought about it a lot lately. I thought about it the most, actually, that first day in the kitchen, seeing you and Kelly together. I realized I hadn’t been fair.”

“Are you kidding? You didn’t do anything wrong.” The old feelings scrape against the new for a moment, the ugly against the beautiful. “I was so fucked up, Reese. I was reeling from my divorce. From this perfect life I thought I’d created. I gave Kelly everything I had and…it wasn’t fucking enough. I wasn’t enough.”

She turns back to me, brings her hand to my cheek. “Do you remember what you told me back then, Eli, when I said I just wanted to keep things casual? To have fun? You said, ‘I can’t do casual.’ You were telling me the truth. I could have taken that as a warning and left. But I didn’t. I read it like an invitation, because I was still so vulnerable…so…lonely after Simon. So I stayed, even though I knew you weren’t ready. And you were so different from him. So kind and caring and hurting because you’d tried so hard to show someone you loved them. I fell for you because of how much you cared.”

My throat is thick now. “I wasn’t ready then, Reese. But I am now. I’m—”

I’m in love with you.

The thought is like a bell, ringing loud and true. I was in love with her then, too, but we’d only been together a few weeks. I thought I was going in too hard, too fast, and that it wouldn’t have worked between us just like it hadn’t worked between me and Kelly. I’d refused to see it.

I thought that part of me was broken. But it’s not, I see that now. It never was.

“Reese—” I begin, wanting to tell her—needing to.

But just then my phone buzzes. It’s loud on the bedside table. I pick it up. It’s a text.

MIKE: You probably want to cancel today, right?

“Shit,” I say.

“Everything okay?”

I explain how earlier, I’d checked my phone to discover the batting class I teach on Saturdays would be canceled due to the snow. “Except there’s one lesson I’m doing off the books.”

I tell Reese it’s the kid I told her about that day in the restaurant when she’d dumped the mimosa on that asshole’s lap. I apologized to Alvin’s dad, Mike, for throwing the bag of bats at him. I knew he cared about his kid; he was just going about showing him the wrong way. “I offered to give Alvin private coaching for free, on the condition that Mike sits off to the side to watch the lesson and doesn’t say a word. We ended up doing it only every third Saturday because of his custody arrangement with Alvin’s mom.”

“And that’s today?” Reese says, glancing out the window.

I nod. “In a couple of hours. I can’t say no, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“Reese, we should talk, right? About what comes after?”

“We should. But maybe it can wait?”

She looks away from me, and I wonder if there’s something she’s not telling me. There are probably a thousand things she’s not telling me. Before this whole thing I foisted on her, she probably had plans of her own, ones I don’t know about.

Ones I’m not a part of.

I think about how cavalier my thoughts were with the wordlove.How easily I could have said it a moment ago, and how easily she could have told me it’s not the same for her. If she wants to put it off, it can’t be good.

But I can’t corner her into staying with me, can I? No matter how much I want it?