Page 28 of Rejected

No no no no.

But he was going on.

“Tell me,” Laurie was panting, coming closer, as if she were drawing him in like a siren. He buried his head in her neck, as he had done since they were teenagers. But now, he was trailing his lips on her throat. The sensation made her tremble, buckle, go utterly weak. Melt. “Tell me you don’t want this forever. Tell me you didn’t feel anything.”

Ah, there it was.

The proposal.

Jo came crashing down to reality.

If he had doused her in frigid lake-water, it would not have woken her up more violently. She pushed him gently, and he stepped away from her at once. His eyes grew into pools of darkness, filling instantly with panic, and something colder. Harder.

Resentment.

“Answer me.” His desperation was turning hard; soon it would irrevocably turn into anger. She knew it. She was watching it happen.

But she could not encourage him.

She could not do it for her life.

“Laurie…”

Don’t, she thought at him. Don’t make me say it.

“Answer me!” he was screaming now, spitting a little, standing there in his wet clothes and drying curls, trembling with passion and anger.

He is losing me, she thought,as much as I am losing him.

“I felt nothing,” she said.

The change that came over him was immediate and violent. It was as if he became a different person, right there, in front of her eyes. Cold and full of bitterness. He let her go so abruptly, she fell on her hands and knees in the shallow water.

He knelt to help her to her feet, completely silent. Cold.

“You saved me once,” he murmured into her hair, as he helped her walk to dry ground. “You have killed me now.”

She just stood there, shivering, completely drenched once more.

She could not feel her limbs. She could not feel her lips. His kisses that had lit her on fire were frozen, as if they had never happened.

But they had. They had.

Coward.

‘I felt nothing,’she had told him.

It was the only way to stop him from proposing again.

Why did you have to ruin everything?She thought furiously, wildly. She did not know who she thought it at—Laurie or herself. Both, probably.

Both.

“Get inside,” Laurie’s voice, unrecognizable, said, as he turned his back to her. He began to pull the boat’s rope out. “Now. You’ll catch your death and your father will kill me.”

“You know there is no one to care,” Jo said.

But if he heard her, he gave no indication.