Anger and pain collided, eclipsing rationale. “A word of advice, El. Think before you talk, because when you don’t, things like what you just said come out, and eventually you’ll piss off someone who really does matter to you.”
He turned his back on her and ripped the harness open. The harsh sound of Velcro echoed through the cave.
“What did I say?” she demanded, sincerely upset.
“It’s all about how you said what you said, and what you didn’t say.” He dropped the harness into a pile and turned on her. He felt raw and gutted and wanted to be anywhere but here, talking to anyone but Giselle. “You just apologized for bitching me out only because you want something, yet I’m not important enough to waste your valuable time trying to figure out how you feel about seeing me again, trying to decide how you feel about me now or even to explain why this thing you want is so important to you. Of course, you fully expect me to comply with your not-so-cleverly-disguised attempt at manipulation. I’m your key source of stress, and I could ruin everything for you. That’s what you said.”
“But that’s not what I meant.” She scraped both hands into her hair, pulling it off her face as her eyes fell closed. She looked as tormented as he felt. “God, you’ve changed so much.”
“You mean the part where I don’t contort myself to fulfill your every wish? Yeah, I guess that’s changed a little. People change over the course of seven years in the prime of their lives, El. But I guess there’s something comforting about the fact that you’re still willing to compromise anything to reach the top.”
He turned away, exhausted from the relentless ache eating him alive, and fished out a water bottle from the cooler. She’d get sick of him and walk out soon. The sooner the better, because the ugly band of two-year-olds who made up this ridiculously immature side of him were running rampant in his psyche.
“Hold on,” she said, anger making her voice rise. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re not thinking twice about getting naked with some guy you’ve never met and getting busy on camera in a cave so you can take that next step up the ladder, just like you didn’t think twice about fucking a stranger in a club so you could get sexy for a music video to push your song to the top of the charts, just like you didn’t think twice about walking away from me to get your break.”
She sipped air and held it. Pain and anger flashed across her face, and a very familiar self-hatred welled inside him.
She closed her eyes and lifted her hands to her head. In a low voice, likely more for herself than for Troy, she murmured, “I’m not going to get mad. I’m not going to get mad.” Then louder. “I’m not going to get mad, because one: you don’t know what you’re talking about, two: you’re speaking out of anger and you know what you’re saying isn’t true, and three: you probably have half a dozen little brats running around in your head right now turning you into a lunatic.”
He scowled hard, but a bittersweet balm swelled somewhere deep inside him. “Don’t pretend you know me.”
She crossed her arms again, and tilted her head with that knowing look. “I bet they’re playing cops and robbers, chasing and shooting each other, creating chaos.”
Goddammit. “It’s cowboys and Indians. They haven’t been into cops and robbers in years. See, you don’t know.”
Her lips quirked. “Anyone burning at the stake yet?”
He laughed, totally against his will. He didn’t want this. He didn’t want to know how well she still understood him. Didn’t want to be reminded of what he was missing. He didn’t want amiable. He didn’t want forgiveness. He didn’t want letting go and forgetting and putting it behind them. It might be wrong, it might be backward and fucked up, but he’d rather have the hurt to hold on to than nothing.
Only now he realized that maybe Giselle needed something else. Maybe she did need to let go. And maybe he needed to let her.
“The cowboys keep breaking the ropes. But my Indians are resourceful. There will be burning flesh,” he warned with a wag of his finger. “Soon.”
She smiled, a sweet, authentic smile Troy recognized as pure Giselle. A smile that brought a wave of loss so deep, it had the power to drop him to his knees if he let it. He purposely lowered his gaze to the cave floor, holding on to the anger. Because without the anger, without the fighting, all the pain and the loss bubbled to the surface. And Troy had experienced enough of that for ten lifetimes.
His energy for keeping the battle alive waned. His drive to hold on to the hurt flagged. And a heavy beat of silence filled the cave. Voices drifted in from a distance. They were alone, with nothing but a few feet of air separating them, yet he felt like they were separated by miles. And he had no idea how to close that distance—or even if he should.
“Are you over your claustrophobia?” he asked.
“Not exactly, but I’m better at dealing with it.”
“Does your manager know?”
“Yes.”
He lifted his gaze without moving his head. “Does he really know?”
She shifted on her feet. “No.” With her lips pressed tight, she scanned the cave again. “You think this is a really stupid idea, don’t you? Me working in these caves.”
He huffed a laugh with absolutely no humor in it. “When’s the last time you gave a fuck what I thought?”
Her gaze sharpened and drilled into his like fiery blue ice. “I hung on your every word right up until the day you told my manager to go screw himself with a pogo stick after he’d gotten me a goddamned tour with Lady Antebellum.”
The past spun back at warp speed and hit him square in the forehead. Damn, that would leave a mark. But he still cracked a smile. “Yeah. I did that, didn’t I?” He shook his head. “Man, Ellie, you should have dumped me a lot sooner than you did.”
A mixture of volatile emotions twisted her face before she pulled in a breath to speak.