Page 53 of Date Knight (Roll for Romance #2)

“Yesterday’s,” Amy corrected, and when I frowned in confusion, she showed me the time on her phone. “It’s almost two in the morning. Yesterday’s fall.”

“Right.”

“I’ve been out here since half eight, you know. I nearly broke a window so I could use the toilet and charge my phone.”

“You can go now if you want,” I said, but she didn’t move, and I didn’t repeat myself.

We sat side by side in silence for a solid minute, and as much as I would have liked to be thinking of how to apologise for making her wait, for making her worry, I couldn’t.

My head was already swimming with next steps for Ethel, and what that meant for me.

I’d need to upgrade the car, for sure, and I’d need to rethink the sched?—

“So what’s the plan?” Amy asked, interrupting my train of thought. I looked at her in confusion, thrown.

“The plan?”

“For Ethel,” she said, with an implied “Obviously”.

“Presumably there’s more physio now, and I’ll need to retrofit the back seat of the car to be accessible, but I’m sure there are companies that can do that.

And will she be in the wheelchair all the time?

If so, we should think about looking for a more comfortable one for her, because those NHS ones can be a bit… ”

It was all too much, this echo of the concerns swirling around my own mind, and I couldn’t listen to it.

Not just because it was overwhelming, though it certainly was, but because as I watched Amy, I saw her slipping into the role of caretaker.

She was a twenty-five-year-old with a beat-up old Land Rover, and she was talking about retrofitting it for a wheelchair for my grandmother.

She’d worked so hard to build the life she wanted since moving home, and here she was willing to reshape it literally overnight for Ethel. For me.

In that moment, I’d never felt more tired in my life.

I wanted desperately to be in her shoes; to have the world at my fingertips, and be bold and beautiful and clever enough to have any of it that I wanted.

She was one of the most amazing people I’d ever known, and she always had been.

And she deserved an equally amazing life.

But my life? It wasn’t fun or bold or carefree.

It hadn’t been for a long time, as much as I enjoyed pretending some evenings and weekends that it was.

That I could still be that guy. And as much as I desperately wanted her with me, as much as she made things better just by being there, I couldn’t keep subjecting her to that.

She’d said it herself, that I’d given up my twenties to Ethel, and I was fully prepared to give her my thirties too.

She deserved every second of my time. But I wouldn’t take the best years of Amy’s life from her.

So I slammed all the doors inside me shut and locked them tight.

“Anil and I have the plan covered,” I said. “Thanks for the offer, though.”

Amy’s face fell. “Oh,” she said, swallowing hard. “I mean, maybe let’s get some sleep and we can talk about it tomorrow? Come on, let’s go inside.”

She reached out to me, and I could see in her face and the tremble in her hand that she was pleading with me. But I just shook my head.

“Honestly, I think we should just call it,” I said. “This was never part of the deal.”

She recoiled as if I’d slapped her, and I suppressed a wince at how cold I sounded.

“The deal?”

“Yeah, the deal. I know it’s not been three months, but I think we both got what we wanted from it, right? You’ve nailed things at work, and everyone’s off our backs about dating.”

I saw her lip begin to quiver before she bit it back, and the part of me still locked in the room labelled “Amy” banged at the door, yelling for me to go kiss the quiver away. To tell her I was sorry, and stupid, and didn’t know what I was saying, and to take her inside and find sleep together.

But that part of me had had his fun, and there was too much to be done to let him out again.

“What about the ball?” she asked as she crossed her arms. “That was part of the deal.”

I shook my head. “I can’t leave Ethel for the weekend now. Hell, I may not even be able to leave her for the evening. But maybe that’s for the best so we can get a bit of distance.”

“Distance,” she repeated, her mouth pulling into a smirk. Don’t do that , I thought. Don’t dig your heels in. But this was Amy we were talking about, and I’d learned five years ago how she reacted to feeling hurt.

I’d also learned five years ago how to drive her away. And despite everything in me desperate to do the opposite, I knew that was what I had to do.

“Even without the ball, though,” I said, already hating myself as I formed the words, “you got what you wanted, didn’t you?”

“Oh yeah?” She tilted her head to the side, and I could tell she was biting back tears. “And what was that?”

I summoned the worst version of myself, smirking up at her and rolling my eyes as if I weren’t dying inside. “You know,” I said, as if we were in on a secret. “You’ve always had a thing for me, right? So you got to see that through, and same for me. Win-win.”

I watched as the last hope of repair left Amy’s eyes. She sucked a deep breath in through her nose– I could see her nostrils flare with anger as she did– and just nodded.

“Got it,” she said, her voice matching mine now. “Lucky me. I’ll go tick that off my bucket list then.”

She lingered for a moment with her eyes narrowed, as if expecting me to try to have the last word, but I didn’t want it.

I just wanted her to go, and take with her the risk that I would choose to be selfish and trap her in this mess with me.

So I stayed quiet, trying to keep an image of nonchalance on my face as her bravado slipped for just a minute, letting a tear slide down her face.

She wiped at it, embarrassed, and took off running down the street.

It wasn’t until she turned the corner that I let my own tears fall.