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“I have to pee, which I can’t do with your hand on my ass and your big body on top of mine. Or with you watching. And you know what?” She pokes my chest. “After I overheard Reid talking to you, I said I wasn’t going to run because you didn’t deny what your brother said. You didn’t deny a past that he knows and worries about. You didn’t tell me I didn’t understand what I heard when we both know I did. That felt honest. I need honesty in my life. Be honest with me and if you aren’t, I won’t run away, but I will walk away. Be you, because I can’t deal with another man who seems like one thing but turns out to be another.”
Be me.
Be honest.
She wouldn’t like the truth I have to hide, not my truth, but I don’t say this. She won’t accept it. Instead, I choose to be honest about what I can be, what I’m willing to disclose. “You want honest? When I said any man could fall in love with you, I meant me.Icould fall in love with you, Abbie, if you give me the chance, but I won’t get that chance if you take a fall for me that I don’t need you to take.”
And then I dare to ask for what I don’t deserve to hear the answer to, considering how quickly I’ve just avoided the real truth of who and what I am. “I need you to trust me.Reallytrust me. I need us to be a team. You and me, baby. We fight this together. Remember? That’s our word: together.”
Chapter sixty-one
Gabe
Seconds tick by and Abbie just stares up at me. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t snap back as she has been the past ten minutes. The small guest bathroom of my sister’s apartment shrinks, my near declaration of love hanging in the air between us, obviously not well received. I give a choked laugh. “You wanted honest? You got love, baby. That’s as damn honest as it gets.”
“Don’t. Don’t fall in love, Gabe. Love is ugly. It cuts and it makes you bleed and—”
I cup her head and stare down at her. “I will never cut you and I will never make you bleed.”
“No one thinks that’s how love will treat them,” she says. “But then they’re crying bloody damn tears.”
She’s afraid.
Ishould be afraid. Hell, I have as many reasons as she has to punch a hole through love, but it doesn’t seem to matter. I can’t seem to shut down with this woman. “I’m not doing this alone, Abbie. If I’m falling, you’re falling with me.”
Her fingers curl on my chest. “I won’t fall, Gabe.”
“I’ll catch you. Give me the chance, and you’ll see that I’ll catch you. Hell, I’m trying to show you that now.”
“You—are wonderful. You’ve been nothingbutwonderful.”
I narrow my eyes on her. “But?”
“No buts. That’s a fact.”
“He was wonderful at first, too,” I say, understanding washing over me.
“Not in the Gabe kind of way. He was debonair and charming, but he wasn’t you. I don’t mean to judge you by him, because that’s not fair.”
“What’s the Gabe kind of way, Abbie?”
“You’re funny and sweet and yet so damn protective. He was never those things. He was flowers and jewelry, and nothing more. Superficial things that meant nothing.”
“You want flowers and jewelry.”
“Don’t turn me being honest into that, Gabe. I don’t care about flowers and jewelry. I said those things don’t matter.”
“I can give you those things and more. I haven’t had time.”
“You already have.”
“And yet you want me to fall alone?”
“No. God, no. Iwantyou to be the man of my dreams and that is some scary shit, Gabe. I don’t really know you.”
“You know more than you think.”
“I know you’re determined to keep a part of you locked away and it’s not even fair for me to ask you to share those parts of yourself right now. We’re new and—I have no right.”
