It hurt.
He continued to stare at me and didn’t invite me inside.
“Can I come in or…?”
He dropped his hand from the knob and walked into the penthouse, turning his back to me as he moved farther into the living room.
I shut the door behind me then walked to him. “Derek—”
“I said I would see you on Monday.” He turned back around and stared me down. “I need space right now. I thought I made that pretty obvious.”
“Obvious would be telling me you need space because something happened. You didn’t say that, Derek. And I didn’t come here to interrogate you. I came because I’m worried. That’s all.”
His eyes didn’t soften like they should.
“Talk to me.”
“I don’t want to talk, Emerson. I want to be alone—”
“Don’t call me that.” My body immediately lit on fire, angry fire. “You call me baby. Only baby. No first-name bullshit.”
He stilled like he didn’t expect the outburst.
“I don’t like it when you treat me differently because you’re upset.”
“I wouldn’t have treated you differently if you’d given me the space I clearly need.” He didn’t raise his voice like I did, but somehow, he was louder than I was. “I fucking love you with all my heart, but I just need some time to myself. Is that really that egregious?”
“No. I just wish…you would confide in me.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said quickly.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t,” he snapped. “I don’t have to share every little thing with you—”
“But I would hope that you’d want to. Derek, I know everything about you. Why is this off the table?” He told me about the Odyssey, about his mom, but he wouldn’t tell me this, and I didn’t understand why.
He looked away and turned silent.
“I’m not challenging you. I’m just asking.”
He sighed quietly, closed his eyes, and after he considered it his answer, he opened them again. “It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and every time I talk about it, it …makes me feel just as bad as I felt when it actually happened. It’s hard to understand, but my memory works differently than other people’s. Normal people can only memorize up to seven numbers and not exceed that. I can memorize a hundred. When things happen to me, they’re always fresh in my mind, so it’s harder for me to get past things. Normal people forget within a reasonable amount of time, the details become hazy, and that’s a good thing because it allows them to bounce back. But with me, it’s always fresh. So when I talk about it, it’s like experiencing it all over again, like a goddamn motion picture in my head, and I just…don’t want to do it. My dad has the same problem, and it’s more of a curse than a blessing. He can remember entire days we spent together at the cabin when I was six, and when he’s having a bad day, he just plays that video in his head. But he also remembers all the bad things too.”
I’d never thought of that before, how having such a high intelligence would affect your life in so many negative ways. “That makes sense, Derek. I can’t even imagine.”
He stood there for a while, moving his hands to his hips, standing in his just his sweatpants and nothing else. He looked out the window for a while before he turned back to me, his eyes not as harsh as they were before. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you. We’ve gone through this same scenario so many times, and you’re just trying to help me…and I act like an asshole.”
“You don’t act like an asshole, Derek.” When I saw my man come back to me, I felt the tightness in my chest evaporate. I loved this side of him, thoughtful and sensitive. “You’re upset. We do negative things when we’re upset.”
“But I shouldn’t do negative things to you… I’m sorry.”
“I’m the one who came over here—”
“Because you care about me. Because you love me. And I should be happy that you do that, not upset.”
And just like that, he swept me off my feet again.
He moved into me and wrapped his thick arms around me in an embrace, pulling me close and pressing a kiss to my hairline, smothering me with love that I could feel and didn’t need to hear with words.
I closed my eyes and rested my cheek against his chest.
Before he pulled away, he gave my neck a few kisses.
When his arms were gone, I suddenly felt cold. His touch made me higher than a kite, but his withdrawal made me feel so unhappy, I wasn’t sure if I would ever be happy again.
He moved to the couch and took a seat, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees.
I sat across from him and stared at his sexiness, that shadow along his jaw that was growing in thicker and thicker because he stopped shaving over the weekend, probably because he was in a sour mood. The veins all over his hard muscles of his arms and hands were like rivers…beautiful. “So, did you have a good time at all?”