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I helped her into the shower and followed closely behind her, stepping under the hot water with her. There wasn’t a single part of this that felt sexual to me—something was clearly wrong, and I just needed to fix it. I just had to piece this back together. Just add one more puzzle to the pile.
“What happened?”
She shook her head before burying her forehead in my bare chest. “I can’t stop panicking. I feel like I’ve been having an anxiety attack for three days straight. Em wasn’t answering my calls and I just…” She took a few deep breaths, but they sounded more like gasps. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
I wrapped my arms around her body and leaned against the wall, holding her freezing, shivering form to me. I knew how she felt—I’d been feeling it too lately. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do to help?”
She didn’t answer, but the little choked wheezes coming from her told me plain enough that she was crying. I couldn’tremember if I’d ever seen her cry before. Certainly not as an adult.
“You’re okay,” I whispered, holding the back of her head as it slowly began to warm up. “You’re okay.”
————
It shouldn’t have bothered me when I’d offered for her to stay the night and she’d said no. It shouldn’t have bothered me when she’d declined to stay a little longer and have a drink with me.
But it did.
She’d calmed down enough after the shower, and after a handful more apologies and my insistence that she at least borrow some of my clothes and use my driver to get home, she’d left.
And that was it.
An hour, tops, of time with her—enough to get her stable and thinking somewhat clearly. But her refusal to stay at all left me questioning things.
I almost felt used, but I wouldn’t ever assume she’d come here just to leave me feeling empty. But that was the result anyway, and although I didn’t want to push her on it or make her feel any more uncomfortable than she clearly was, it felt almost as if she was pulling away.
As if she was struggling to separate herself from all of it.
As if she needed a quick hit and was weaning herself.
I’d been distant, sure, and I knew it wouldn’t be easy for either of us. But I couldn’t stop myself from worrying that maybe she was rethinking everything. Maybe she was considering this done and over despite my insistence that wasn’t what I wanted.
But maybe it was whatshewanted. And that was fucking horrifying to think about.
Chapter 29
Ava
Ihadn’t been able to bring myself to reach out to him for four days after I’d turned up at his apartment.
The stress of deciding whether or not to tell him about the life growing inside of me was eating me from the inside out, devouring everything in its wake. I was nothing but a walking panic attack, and despite him calming me down for a couple of hours and enabling me to actually get a good few hours of sleep, I felt like a zombie in my own skin.
“Ava,” Emily said softly, brushing my heat-curled hair away from my face as she looked at me in the bedroom mirror. She’d done everything in her power to make me look presentable—my makeup, my hair, even spritzing me down with perfume. “I’m sorry, but the…the dress doesn’t fit.”
She let go of the zipper on my back. The backs of my eyes burned.
“Do you have anything else?”
I reached around to my back and unzipped what she’d managed to zip up. “I’m not going,” I croaked.
“You have to go, Aves,” she insisted. “That will raise so many more questions.”
“Just tell my dad I’m sick.”
“I think he might insist you see a doctor if you use that excuse again,” she sighed.
“I don’t care.”
“Won’t Adrian be there? He’ll be worried if you don’t turn up.” She pushed the straps off my shoulders and helped me push the dress down over my thighs. “You’ve got to go.”
