Page 42 of Guarded Knight

“Well, how about I giveyousome advice?”

He moves even closer, his chest heaves; one more millimeter and his pecs would whisper across my chest.

“Your problem, Lara, is that you give pieces of yourself to people who don’t deserve it. And I get it. You’ve always been light in the dark. But you’re not infinite. You don’t have pieces to waste.”

I’m not sure my sarcasm covers the hurt in my voice. “You’re right. I don’t have pieces to waste, but you sure as hell discarded the ones I gave you without a second glance.”

There’s an incoming tide of pain in his deep-brown eyes.

“Lara, you deserve someone who can make you happy all the time…” His words drop off as if he can’t put the rest of them through rising emotion. “At leastIhad the decency to let go.”

“Let go?” My throat tightens. “You never really came to get me in the first place…”

Not only that, Gabriel flat-out told me before he discharged that we would never happen.

Just then, the side door creaks open.

“Hey,” Freya’s voice cuts through the static, light but laced with caution. “Everything okay?”

I glance back at Gabriel, but he’s already turned away, fists clenched, jaw like granite.

“Peachy,” I lie and follow Freya back inside.

But Gabriel’s words burn in my rib cage.

I’m not sure if I want to scream about this moment, cry about our past… or kiss the man who lit the match.

11

Gabriel didn’t sleepon the couch last night. He slept in his truck.

Maybe he met with Anton. Maybe he just didn’t want to be where that alley conversation left us, halfway between a fight and a dangerous collision with our past.

Do we really need to resurrect those feelings?

Not that he owes me anything. He explained himself years ago in typical Gabriel fashion: a few words about PTSD, zero room for misinterpretation. He told me he cared about me. Deeply.

And that he couldn’t be what I deserved.

At least I had the decency to walk away.

And walk away he did. That’s the problem. But that look in his eyes in the alley tells me it wasn’t about him, it wasn’t just about working on his demons like he said all those years ago, but it was about letting me get what he thought I deserved, too…

More than him.

It’s the first time I ever considered that him never coming back was for my benefit and not just his.

But that’s what made my chest so damn empty… It wasn’t that he had trauma to work through and wanted to focus on himself. He had a heap of it with war and his mom dying… I understood it wasn’t a good time for him to be in a relationship. Hell, I was exploring my independence, too, at college, and convinced myself it just wasn’t the right time.

But I always eventually thought we’d both return to Starlight Canyon one day and pick up where we left off.

But even while I returned, he drifted. Kept his distance. Only showed up for holidays and birthday parties, always on the edge of things. He made efforts to say hi. But he didn’t try to stay. Not in the town we both came from. Not in the life that could’ve included me.

And each time he came back, he was a shadow of himself. It hurt to see him that way and know there was nothing I could do. So I built the wall.

I barely got any work done this morning, and now I need to get to San Jose to meet my new doctor.

As if yesterday wasn’t weird enough, it’s also my first appointment with my new adult CF doctor.