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“Definitely not that,” I agree while dying inside.
When he pushes away from me, it feels like I’m freezing.
Ezra drops his legs over the side of the bed, laughing to himself about still being mostly dressed.
I watch as he holds his jeans up enough to walk to the bathroom and clean up, his stare trapping mine as he returns with a damp cloth to clean me as well.
Dropping it onto the floor when he’s done, he stretches out beside me and tugs my back to his chest.
“We can’t do any of that, Em. Not again.”
I wonder if I’ll ever dry up so that the tears stop falling.
“I know,” I whisper, afraid to close my eyes, terrified this moment is over.
Ezra
Emily fell asleep with me beside her. Dark red hair would fall across her face every so often, and I brushed it away so I could memorize her features this way.
For a few hours, I watched her sleep. Counted every slow, even breath, imagined that her heart beat only for me.
Outside her room, voices would rise and fall, laughter mingling with music, the usual rowdy bullshit that reminded me of when Em and I were in high school, and all the parties at Yale she never attended.
It becomes white noise through the years as you get used to it, like the chorus of frogs in the South, or traffic in busy cities. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t piss me off when I first arrived here and had to wade through it.
Not that I had to shove kids aside or threaten them with a glance. My reputation precedes me, apparently, all those little fucks moving as I walked through, their eyes following me as I made my way down the hall toward Emily’s room.
There were a few whispers I ignored because my head was stuck on what I would say to Em when I walked in here.
It had been my intention to lay out the rules, to ensure that we could ride out these next six weeks with minimal damage.
But when I opened the door and found her asleep in bed, all those intentions went straight to hell because I couldn’t resist the urge to crawl in beside her, to hold her if only for a few minutes to remember what it used to be like.
I was stupid in high school to believe that anything good could happen in my life.
And Emily is so good.
Too good.
She’s everything I want but don’t deserve to have.
How can a beast ever be good enough for a queen?
How can a beaten down man ever be enough for a woman who stands tall despite the weight on her shoulders?
Still, it doesn’t stop me from pretending that I can be what she needs.
Now I’m curled up beside her several stolen hours later after breaking every rule I’d hoped to set, my eyes staring at the red glow of numbers in the alarm clock next to her bed.
It’s three in the morning. The party is still going strong outside her door. And I need to get the fuck out of here before I fall asleep.
The problem is I don’t want to.
As soon as I walk out that door, we’re back to beingfriends. I’ll be back to watching her have an easy relationship with Damon while casting angry, little scowls at me. Mostly because I know I’ll still be angry. I’ll still hate what she did to us and hold it against her.
I’ll still be the bastard holding her feet to the fire because I can’t let it go.
I wish I could say I’m a better man than that, but her betrayal cut too deep. And I’m not dumb enough to try to lie to myself about something as obvious as that.