Page 153 of Boardroom Mask

I grip the chains tighter. The cold metal burns my palms.

“What I said to you,” he continues, “what I called you…”

I clear my throat. “Please don’t repeat it.”

“I won’t.” He takes a breath. “I was wrong. I was so fucking wrong, Jillian, and I knew it the second I walked out of your apartment, but I was too goddamn proud and too goddamn hurt to turn around.”

I look at the ground. At his shoes, expensive and mud-flecked.

Then Kir drops to his knees in front of me.

Right there in the playground, in his thousand-dollar pants, he drops like someone cut his strings. My breath catches in my throat because I have imagined this so many times since he left.In the shower, in Macy’s borrowed bed, in the back of a cab, in a church pew at five in the morning. I have played this scene in my head a million different ways, but not one of them prepared me for the real thing.

He reaches for my hands. I let him take them, and like always, his fingers are burning hot where mine are so cold and lonely. He heats me up with that single touch. He pulls my hands off the chains and holds them together in both of his, pressing my knuckles against his forehead. His head bows. His shoulders curve inward. I can feel him breathing against my skin in short, ragged bursts.

“I’m sorry,” he says into my hands. “For all of it.”

A tear rolls down his cheek and lands on our knuckles. Then another.

“You changed me,” he explains. “Before you, I was just running my father’s errands and calling it a life. The things I did were… They were horrible, to say the least. And then you bit through my glove, and I was done. Right then. First night. It was a kill shot through the heart, but not the one that was supposed to happen.”

Another tear splashes on our hands. I feel it spread warm across my frozen knuckles.

“I don’t deserve you. I know that. I broke into your home. I terrorized you. I put a gun to your back and made you smile for your neighbor while I stood behind the door. I beat him half to death because he asked you to dinner.” He swallows hard. “I watched you through a camera. I followed you to this playground and I didn’t understand what I was seeing, and whenI finally did understand, I used it to hurt you. I took the worst thing you ever went through and I threw it in your face.”

He’s clinging to me hard enough to hurt now, but the pain is a good thing. It grounds us both.

“You are the bravest person I have ever known, Jillian Pierce. You carried a child you didn’t ask for, and you loved her enough to give her a life you couldn’t.” He lifts his head. His eyes are red, wet, and vulnerable. “I love you. I loved you before I knew your name. I’ll love you long after you tell me to go back out the window I came through. Mask or no mask, gun or no gun, it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m here on my knees in front of you to tell you I love you, because this is the only way it feels right to say it.”

My own eyes are leaking now. “Kir, you can’t say that. You can’t love me. How could you? I ruined you. Everything I wrote was wrong, and you told me not to publish, but I did it anyway. I ruin it all, Kir, I’m a fuck-up, I’m a?—”

“Stop.”

“No, listen to me!” I insist. “You shouldn’t love me. Don’t. I’m telling you to?—”

“I’m tellingyouto stop.” He pulls my hands down from his forehead and holds them against his chest, right over his heart. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

“Of course I do! I have everything to?—”

“You did your job,” he says simply. “You did what you thought was right.”

I’m still torn up with guilt. “But I?—”

“My mother made her choices and my father honored them. The responsibility belongs to them, not us.” I shake my head, but he squeezes my hands until I look at him. “You have nothing to apologize for,” he repeats. “Not to me. Not to anyone.”

More arguments are right there on the tip of my tongue, but Kir’s heart is beating under my palms, steady and sure, and his eyes are so open it hurts me to look at them.

“I love you, little fox,” he says again. “I love you and I want the future we’ve dreamed of. I want Sunday mornings where neither of us has anywhere to be. I want to burn dinner and eat cereal instead and fall asleep with you in my arms. I want to drive you to New Jersey, whenever you’re ready. I’ll wait in the car or I’ll hold your hand, but I want to be there when you finally meet her.”

That breaks me. A sob rips out of my chest and I pitch forward off the swing into him. He catches me, steadies me, kisses my temple.

“Okay,” I whisper into his collar. “Okay. Yes. To all of it.”

But there’s a missing moment that follows. This is the part where he kisses me and pulls me to my feet, and we walk toward that happy ending together. It doesn’t happen, though. For a second, nothing does. The swing croaks behind us from the momentum of my fall,Screeee, Screeee,but Kir’s heart pauses and mine follows suit. There’s a hesitation in his breath.

I lean back and look at him. “… Kir?”

“I want those things so fucking badly, Jillian.” Slowly, he unpeels my hands from his and puts them at my sides. “But that’s why I cannot have them.”