I turn, walking into the bedroom, planning to crawl into bed before remembering it’s the bed they got together, hoping maybe Perry would sleep better on it. I groan, turning around and walking right into Ansel’s broad chest.
When I try to push past him, he stops me, gripping my shoulders with shaking hands. “Please don’t walk away.”
I feel like a tornado is crashing around in my mind, but as usual, even though I’m so mad at him I could scream, the feel of his body so close and his hands sliding up my arms is so comforting, it starts to make order out of the chaos. His eyes soften and he blinks down to my mouth. “We need to keep talking about this.”
But when I try to speak, the words come out choked, stunted. “Y-y-y-y—” I close my eyes, trying again. “Y-y-y-y-you—”
Fuck!
I open my eyes, not sure what reaction I’ll see in his face because he’s really never heard me stutter and it hardly ever happens anymore.
His eyes are wide and his face contorted in pain as if he’s broken me. “Shit, Mia.”
“D-d-don’t.”
“Mia . . .” He groans, pressing his face to my neck.
I push him away, wanting pretty much anything other than his sympathy right now. The anger makes my words come out sharper, and with each one I deliver, my tongue relaxes. “Y-you were w-with her so long. I just . . . tonight I felt like the other woman, you know? For the first time yesterday, I felt like your wife. But tonight I felt like I’d stolen you from her.”
“No,” he says, relief washing over his expression as he pushes my hair off my face so he can kiss my cheek. “Of course we broke up before I met you.”
Fuck. I have to ask. “But how long before you left?”
His face falls and I feel like I can hear every second tick past as he hesitates to answer.
“Ansel.”
“A few days.”
My heart sinks and I close my eyes, unable to look at him. “She moved out while you were gone, didn’t she?”
Another hesitation. “Yes.”
“You broke up with your girlfriend of six years only a few days before you married me.”
“Well, technically we broke up three weeks before I met you. I’d been biking across the States before Vegas,” he reminds me. “But it felt like it ended a long time before that. We both knew it was over. She is clinging to something that doesn’t exist anymore.” He cups my cheek and waits until I look up at him. “I wasn’t looking for anything, Mia, but that’s why I trust what I feel for you. I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever known.”
When I don’t say anything to this, he asks, “Can I tell you now? Everything?”
I don’t bother answering out loud. On the one hand, it seems a little late for a full disclosure. On the other, a sick part of me wants to know everything.
“Bike and Build started in May, and went through September,” he begins. “Finn, Olls, Perry, and I all became close within days of orientation. It was that kind of experience, okay, where everyone is thrown together and some friendships solidify, and others don’t? But ours, it did.”
He pauses, trailing his fingers down my arm.
“But it wasn’t an immediate affair with Perry and me, not sexual. She wanted it. At least, Oliver and Finn always insist that she wanted something with me from the first few days. I think I started to notice what they meant, maybe in July? And by August, I felt so much fondness and friendship for all of them that I would give her anything.” Pulling back so he can look at me in the dim light from the moon, he says, “Even sex. We only were lovers twice on that trip. A random night in August, when we were very drunk. And then, a few weeks later—after it had been so awkward and loaded with us—we were together on the last night before the excursion ended.”
My stomach twists in a strange combination of relief and pain and I close my eyes, forcing away the image of his hands on her body, his mouth full of hers.
“After that, Perry came back here, and I moved to Nashville for school. We were together without ever really discussing it. She assumed we were, and I wanted to give her that. We saw each other maybe two times a year, and everything else I told you was true. She got to know me well on the trip, sure. But I was twenty-two. I was not the same man then that I am now and we grew apart very quickly.”
He lowers his voice, sounding pained. “And as a love affair, it wasn’t ever passionate, Mia. It was . . .” He curses, wiping a hand across his face. “Like in . . . how do you say it?” He looks at me and I look away, unable to resist the adorable way his lips push forward as he searches for words. “Cendrillon? The fairy tale with the stepmother?”
“Cinderella?” I guess.
He snaps, nodding, and continues, “Like in Cinderella. I think we both wanted the glass shoe to fit. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“She was the one I cheated on, two times. It is my most guilty thing, Mia. I realized I couldn’t do it anymore, that I’d done exactly what I always said I wouldn’t do, like my father, okay? I called to do the right thing for once and end things with her, and”—he pauses, taking a deep breath—“Perry couldn’t wait to tell me she turned down a design job in Nice so we could finally be together in Paris.”
I blink away, refusing to feel bad for him.
“So I . . .” He trails off, looking for the right word, and I’m more than happy to help him out here.
“You chickened out.”
He nods. “Okay, yes. And that really wasn’t fair to her. I should have ended things.”
“We both know I came here to escape my problems. But all this time you’re acting like some sort of benefactor, when you’re escaping, too. You used me to escape having to deal with her. You’re impulsive and do things without thinking, and, look, you married me. You convinced yourself you were being responsible, or doing the right thing by bringing me back, but you were really just making up for your past mistakes with Perry. I’m your way to make up for that. I’m your proof that you’re not your father.”
“Non,” he insists, voice as sharp as a blade. “I escaped into you, yes. But not because I was using you to prove something to myself, or make up for some mistake. I didn’t have to get your ticket; I didn’t have to track you down at the zoo. I know I’m not my father; it’s why I was disappointed with myself and how I treated Perry. I escaped into you because I fell in love with you.”
I let his words echo around the room until they’re drowned out by the sounds of horns and motorcycles and delivery trucks rumbling down narrow cobblestone streets late at night. I don’t even know what to think. My heart tells me to trust him, that he wasn’t intentionally keeping things from me for nefarious reasons, and that it really was just awkward and difficult to find the right time.
But my mind tells me it’s bullshit, and that if he wanted to develop real trust between us, he wouldn’t have used her nickname with me, he would have just told me who she was to him, that they lived together here, and how one of his closest friends is now his ex-fiancée. I want to shove him away for withholding information in our safest place: during role play, and the honesty it gave us.
It really isn’t that he has a past that bothers me. It’s the way he’s been keeping me in the dark, keeping me separate from the rest of his life, lying until he thinks we’ve reached some imagined milestone where he can be honest. And really, whether it’s intentional or not doesn’t matter. Maybe he didn’t think we would last past the summer, either.
“Have you felt real passion for me?” he asks quietly. “I’m suddenly very worried I’ve ruined this.”
After barely a breath, I nod, but in a way I worry I’m answering both questions: actual, and implied. The passion I feel for him is so intense it’s pulled me into his arms right now, even feeling as mad as I do. My skin seems to hum with warmth when I’m this close to him; his scent is overwhelming. But I’m also worried that he has ruined this.
“I’ve never felt this before,” he says into my hair. “Love like this.”
But my mind keeps looping back to the same question, the same dark betrayal. “Ansel?”
“Hmm?” His lips brush over my temple.
“How could you tell her about my accident? What made you think it was okay to share that with her?”
Ansel freezes beside me. “I did not.”
“She knew,” I say, growing angry again. “Ansel, she knew I’d been hit. She knew about my leg.”
“Not from me,” he insists. “Mia, I swear. If she heard anything about you—other than your name, and that you’re my wife—it would be from Oliver or Finn. They’re all still friends. This has been so weird for everyone.” He searches my eyes, lowering his voice when he says, “I don’t know why she talked to you. I don’t know why she went up to you tonight; she knows I would never be okay with her doing that.”
“You talked to her on the phone,” I remind him. “She came here in the middle of the night. You met her for lunch when you were even too busy to stay for breakfast with me. Maybe she doesn’t think the two of you are really done.”
He takes a few seconds to respond, but his hand spreads possessively across my breastbone, thumb sweeping up to the hollow of my throat. “She knows we’re done. But I’m not going to pretend like it was an easy breakup. It hasn’t been easy for her to know you’re here with me.”
There’s a softness in his voice I can’t handle right now, some sympathy for her and what she’s going through that makes me feel insane. Somewhere in my rational brain I’m glad he cares how this is for her; it means he’s not a complete ass**le. It means he’s a good guy. But really, he f**ked up so enormously, I don’t have the bandwidth to admire him while I’m still this angry.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t worry too much, I’m pretty sure she came out with the upper hand tonight.” I push him away when he reaches for me.
“Mia, that’s not—”
“Just stop.”
He grabs my arm when I begin to walk away and spins me, pressing my back to the wall and staring me down with a look so intense it causes goose bumps to rise along my skin. “I don’t want this to be hard on either of you,” he says in a deliberately patient voice, “and I know the way I’ve handled it was all wrong.”
I close my eyes, pressing my lips together to quell the vibrating hum I feel at his firm touch. I want to shove him, pull his hair, feel the weight of him pinning me down.
“I followed you out of the apartment,” he reminds me, bending to kiss my jaw. “I know it isn’t my job to make sure she’s okay anymore. But if what she feels for me is even a fraction of what I feel for you, I want to be careful with her heart, because I can’t imagine what I would do if you left me.”
It seems impossible that words alone could make me feel like my chest is caving in.
He licks my earlobe, murmuring, “It would wreck me. I need to know that you’re okay right now.”
His hands grow busy on my body in a tight, desperate sort of way. Maybe to distract me, maybe to reassure himself. He works his way down my front, over my thighs, bunching my skirt in his fist as he pulls it up over my hips.
“Ansel . . .” I warn, but even as I turn my head away from his lips, I tilt my pelvis into his touch. My hands form fists at my sides, wanting more, and rougher. Needing reassurance.
“Are you okay?” he asks, kissing my ear.
I don’t turn away when he kisses my chin again, and not even when he moves higher, eyes wide and careful as he kisses my mouth. But when his hand moves between my legs, and he growls, “I’m going to make you so wet,” as his fingers slip beneath my underwear, I find the resolve to push his arm away.
“You can’t fix this with sex.”
He pulls back, eyes wide in confusion. “What?”
I’m incredulous. “You think you can just calm me down by making me come?”
He looks baffled, nearly angry for the first time. “If it calms you down, if it makes you feel better, then who the hell cares how it happens?” His cheeks bloom with a heated blush. “Isn’t that what we’ve been doing all this time? Finding a way to be married, to be intimate even when things are scary or new or just too f**king surreal to process?”
I’m thrown, because he’s right. It’s exactly what we’ve been doing, and I do want to be pulled out of this moment. Distraction, coping, muddling through—whatever it is, I want it. I want to stop talking about all of this. I want him to push away all the doubts in my head and give me the part of him that only I get to see now.
“Fine. Distract me,” I dare him, teeth clenched. “Let’s see if you can make me forget how mad I am.”