Page 176 of Untouchable

He gave her a bitter little smile. “To make peace? To become friends?”

For some reason the words and the smile hurt her chest more than the coolness in his manner. “I never expected to be friends. No. We were never really friends. Were we?”

“No. We weren’t.”

“We were…” She paused but then made herself say it. “We were more.”

“What we were was a lie. You know it as well as I do.”

“Some of it was. You lied to me just like I lied to you. But I don’t think all of it was a lie. There was something… real.”

“But even real things don’t survive something like this.”

He was rejecting her. Obviously. He wasn’t even leaving open the possibility of there being any future between them. He wasn’t even letting her ask.

But she was here, and she could sense something fragile and wounded beneath Caleb’s coldness, and she hated it. She hated that she’d done it to him. She hated to leave it like that. So she said, “I don’t know if that’s true.”

He walked over closer to her, and he gave a dry, humorless laugh. “Seriously? You think we’re going to fall into each other’s arms now? Everything forgiven? After what you did?” Before she could respond, he added, “After what I did too?”

At least he was acknowledging that. He’d had as long to think things through as she had. They were both guilty in this. They’d both torn apart what had been real between them.

But in some ways it was better since it meant they were in the same boat.

“Relationships have survived worse.”

“Have they?” He shook his head. “I don’t know if that’s true. But I can at least speak for myself.”

She stared at him for a full minute, trying to figure out what to say, what to do, whether to even keep trying when he was clearly slamming the door in her face.

Then, suddenly, she was so tired that her legs didn’t want to keep holding her up. She slumped to the leather couch against the wall.

To her surprise, Caleb came over and lowered himself to sit beside her, leaning back as if he was as tired as she was. They didn’t look at each other. They both stared out at the view of DC through the wall of windows.

“I can’t believe you came here,” he said at last, not sounding quite as bitter as before.

“Honestly, I can’t believe it either. I knew there wasn’t much chance. But I just can’t…”

When she didn’t finish, Caleb turned his head to look at her. “You can’t what?”

“I can’t breathe. All the way. Leaving it like that with you, it just didn’t feel like I could breathe.”

Caleb let out his own breath in an audible gust. “Yeah. Me either.”

She sat up straighter, feeling a little hope at that admission. “So maybe we don’t leave it like we did.”

“Then what do you suggest? If it’s not broken but there’s no rosy future waiting for us, what’s left?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know.” Without thinking, she reached out and put a hand on his knee. When he didn’t pull away, she stroked it slowly, wanting to touch him, needing to feel the solid warmth of his body beneath his clothes.

He still didn’t pull away, and it made her feel better, so she kept it up—the touch intimate but intentionally not sexual.

After a minute of silence, Caleb murmured, “I guess I should thank you. For not making what you know public. At least not yet.”

“You don’t have to thank me.”

“You could have told the world what you know.”

“Yeah. And that would have accomplished absolutely nothing. I’m working on…”