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She laughed. “You have. I never knew what to make of you. That’s why Amie got me that shirt.” Zoe tucked her chin down toward her chest and exhaled a soft laughing sound. “I think she knew,” she added quietly. “I think they both did.”
“Knew what?” I asked, voice raw and heart in agony.
When Zoe raised her head, the sheer naked longing I saw in her eyes had my pulse racing. She didn’t answer, though.
My hands drifted helplessly toward her legs, but all I allowed myself was a brush of my thumbs along the outside of her thighs.
Zoe exhaled slowly, a slight shiver racking her body. “I was looking through some old stuff,” she whispered. “Tyler wasn’t even there for ten minutes. I just ... I needed to know if I’d been missing signs this entire time.” There was no need for me to ask the question. “I think maybe I didn’t want to see them,” she admitted.
“Why?”
Zoe took a deep breath, the sweet curves of her breasts rising and falling behind that measly scrap of fabric. That breath, as it turned out, was for fortification, because she gently lifted her hips off the concrete and slid into the water.
The air was thick, and hardly an inch separated her body from mine because I kept my hands braced on the edge, effectively caging her in to the side of the pool.
She wasn’t the only one caged. My want of her kept me locked in place. This hidden way I’d loved her for so long kept me frozen, staunchly refusing to miss another opportunity to touch her.
“It’s hard to admit when you’ve wasted years of your life on someone who didn’t deserve them,” she said quietly. Slowly, she raised a hand and traced the bottom edge of my lip with the pad of her finger. “It’s even worse when you realize the person you want to be with has been in front of you the entire time.”
My entire fucking soul sighed in relief to hear her say it, no matter how complicated it might be. How many of those complications still waited for us. Gently, I rolled my forehead against hers. She settled her hands over my chest.
“I found pictures from that night,” she continued. “The night we met. And then some from a year or two later. More after that.” Zoe licked her lips. “In almost all of them, you were looking at me. Foryears.”
I couldn’t help but close my eyes as the massive fucking wave of feelings swamped me. It was amazing how weak my body felt the longer I listened to her talk.Shemade me weak. Always had. I’d just lost my ability to hide it anymore.
“I think you didn’t tell me the full truth, Liam.”
Opening my eyes again, I found hers locked straight onto mine.
There was no need for me to ask, because I damn well knew what she was talking about.
“Icouldn’t,” I managed in a gruff voice. “Imagine knowing that, with all the shit we were dealing with.”
“I know.”
“It was too much that you actually thought Ihatedyou.” My hands, unable to stay off her for a second longer, inching slowly up the sides of her arms. “I still don’t know how to do any of this, love. I’ve spent my entire life making sure it never happened.”
There it was.
The thing we hadn’t discussed yet, and I fought the urgent swirl of nerves in my stomach, the desire to claw back behind my walls.
Drops of water clung to Zoe’s chest and shoulders, and her hands gently coasted over my chest and shoulders. “That’s the other thing I was thinking about,” she admitted quietly.
In the silence that followed, I fought the urge to crush her body to mine, because this tiny sliver of space between us felt like the Grand bloody Canyon, given what we were talking about.
“We both have things that we’re afraid of, Liam.” Her eyes were clear and wide and candid, and I felt the directness of her gaze straight into my fucking chest. “The worst thing that my divorce did is that I trusted myself just a little bit less, and no matter how you feel about me, that doesn’t disappear. You can’t remove my fears any more than I can erase yours.”
How I wanted her to, though. I wanted her to obliterate them from existence. Destroy the deep, dark pull of those thoughts, the ones that had held so much power over me for so long.
“That’s what so many of us get wrong about relationships,” she continued. “At the end of the day, battling those fears will always be our own responsibility, our own choice. You cannot fix mine, and I can’t fix yours. All we can do is hold on to each other, Liam. Fight those battles side by side.”
Fuck, how simple she made it sound.
“And if it all goes wrong?” I asked. “What about her?”
Zoe sighed. “We’ll always make decisions based on what’s best for Mira. But I can’t pretend anymore. Can you?” She’d said it before she left the house, and I hadn’t been able to say the words. I glanced beyond her to the house, but she took my face in her hands so that I couldn’t look away. “Can you?” she asked again.
My eyes closed for a moment, and no matter how much it fucking terrified me, I ripped the words from my throat so I couldn’t take them back. “You know I can’t.”
