“I can’t believe you thought I wouldn’t.” He locks the stall door, stalking toward me in the space shrinking with every inch he closes between us.
“You can’t be here.” I fold my arms under my breasts, conscious of how my cleavage is on display. His eyes drop to my chest, the glacial blue heating, wanting.
Hell no.
“I am here,” he replies with a calm I know to be false. A muscle ticks in his jaw. His hands are knotted into fists in his well-tailored pants. “And you will talk to me.”
“Go talk to your date,” I snap, turning away from him, facing the diaper changing station.
He grabs my arm and wrenches me around.
“No, you don’t get to do that,” he says, rage burning like a gas light in his eyes. “Not when I just had to sit through the league’s patron saint telling the whole world he loves you. Had to watch him claim you in front of everyone and couldn’t do a damn thing about it.”
“Jared—”
“Haven’t been able to do anything about it for months.”
“Haven’t fucked for months, don’t you mean?” I fire back, jerking my arm from his grasp. “Isn’t that what she’s about? Your new Cindy? I said I didn’t expect you to wait, but you could have at least told me so I didn’t have to find out this way.”
“Find out what exactly?” His voice drops to subzero and his expression is the face of a cliff. “That I’m signing a Swedish soccer player who wanted to attend the awards tonight? Is that what I was supposed to tell you?”
My righteous indignation sputters, shrivels.
“What?” I ask dazedly, wondering if I’ve gotten it all wrong or if he’s just that convincing.
“As for fucking,” he grits out. “I haven’t slept with another woman. Haven’t wanted anyone else since you came back into my life. I haven’t kissed anyone else. Can you say the same? ’Cause you tasted like him last time I saw you.”
“I told you—”
“You haven’t told me shit, Banner.” With one impatient hand, he disrupts the neatness of his hair and paces in the small stall. “Except that you had to do this, and I couldn’t see you, and he was more important.”
“He was fighting for his life, Jared.”
“I get that, but he used it to keep you close, to keep you away from me, and I resent him for it. He was playing his own game. He knew it was me all along. He told me so when I was there.”
“I realized that tonight. Why didn’t you tell me?”
He shrugs, discomfort twisting his expression.
“He said it would distress you, only make it harder, and I believed him. I knew you wouldn’t leave him while he still needed you, and I agreed that it would only create more tension.”
He cups my face between his hands, his eyes losing some of the ice, warming with affection, with passion.
“I should have told you,” he says softly. “I wanted him to know from the beginning anyway.”
I nod, leaning into the warm strength of his h
ands.
“I’ve always known how to play the game, Ban. Always calculated what every move would yield and how I would come out the winner.” He shakes his head, helplessness foreign on his face. “But I didn’t know how to do this, how to handle wanting you for so long and then losing you again to someone we both know deserves you more than I do.”
And his words, so untrue, crystallize the truth for me.
We are a match, an unlikely perfect pair.
Neither of us fully seeing our worth. Not fully comprehending that our hearts were stitched together from the beginning with threads invisible to everyone else. With bonds that didn’t make sense to anyone but us—and sometimes not even to ourselves. Me thinking he deserved someone with a better outside, and him thinking I deserved someone with a better inside. When all along we deserved each other. And in that instant my heart puts words to this feeling that’s been growing and evolving and persisting ever since I saw the most beautiful boy on campus at freshman orientation. My heart articulates something I’ve been afraid of because I thought he couldn’t ever possibly fully reciprocate.
I love him.