And he’d already thought things were pretty fucking bad.
So, yeah. His memory of that midnight kiss was eighty percent rage and twenty percent deadly frustration, which was the name he used for that feeling when you wanted to kick someone’s husband in the nuts until they threw up their own spleen. But this? This couldn’t be further from the last time. It couldn’t be any more different. It couldn’t be any better.
This was Abbie, pressed up against him like she’d crawl inside him if she could, her body warm and soft, temptation wrapped in comfort wrapped in sin. This was Abbie, one of her thumbs stroking the top of his right ear, this tiny millimetre back and forth as if she couldn’t stop herself from touching him, from adoring him in the same tightly restrained way she did almost everything. This was Abbie, her mouth desperate and uncertain on his, the hibiscus scent of her hair swallowing him up like a heavenly cloud, until she suddenly pulled back and gasped, “Oh God, sorry, I’m so sorry—”
“Nope,” he said, and pulled her close again. “You do not get to be sorry. I kissed you. So whatever guilty moment you’re having at kissing someone you don’t care about, I would love it if you could ignore that long enough for me to kiss you some more—”
“I do care about you,” she cried, more emotion in her voice than he remembered hearing at any point, ever.
Unfortunately, he was a bit too wankered to properly examine that fact. “You know what I mean. The way I care about you. Centuries in the making, kind of weird and obsessive, totally romantic and not just because we’re both sexy, caring about you. Like that.”
“Will,” she said, her voice ragged with frustration, and that finally caught his attention. “You don’t understand. I do care about you like that. I really fucking do, which is why this is a terrible idea.”
He frowned, suddenly annoyed with himself for all the gin he’d had—because if he was sober, those words might make sense instead of swirling around on the unabsorbent surface of his brain. “But—you said—”
“I said I couldn’t do this.” The words were fast and raw, her gaze sliding away from his, her fingers curled up tight in the fabric of his jacket. Keeping him close even when she looked like she wanted to be a thousand miles away. “I said I couldn’t, and I can’t, because—when I really, really feel things, so much that it overwhelms me, I either explode with it or I panic and close my fucking mouth. I don’t want to be—too much, to put myself out on a ledge alone. I don’t want to be honest, because, God, Will, you have no idea how bad it can hurt. When you feel everything in the world, but the person you’re with feels nothing. You don’t know.” She shook her head frantically while his stomach lurched at the pain in her eyes. “I’m scared of it. But I know for a fact that relationships only work if you can be brave, and I don’t know how to do that anymore. I only know how to be clever and how to be safe, and I don’t want—”
Will stared, astonished, scrambling to keep up, a fire igniting in his stomach and cautious hope burning through his veins. “What, Abbie? You don’t want what?”
“I don’t want to fail you,” she said.
God, he was too drunk for this. But he understood, or at least, he thought he understood—and he didn’t like what he was hearing. “Fail me? You—you can’t. You couldn’t. Ever. You’d never be too much for me.” The idea was so ridiculous, the words felt alien in his mouth. “And I’d never leave you alone.”
“That’s what you think.” She was smiling, but it was a vicious kind of smile, and he got the sense it was pointed entirely inward. “But you’re drunk. And you don’t know me. And you have no idea how fucked up I feel when it comes to things like this.”
Right now, his heart was glass. One wrong knock could shatter it into piles of fine, gleaming dust at her feet. He wrapped his arms around her and pressed his face against her neck. “Abbie,” he breathed, and he wondered if she could hear all the love and aching pain in that word. “You think I don’t know you? You think—that I wouldn’t want you if I did?”
“That’s not what I said,” she muttered stiffly, which was the final confirmation that it was exactly what she’d meant.
“You’re wrong,” he told her, and nothing had ever been truer. “I do know you. You try to keep yourself from me, but you’re not that good at it. And I might not know everything, but I can see that you’re hurt, and I can see that you’re scared, and I don’t want you to—just stop. I don’t want you to be different for me. I want you to tell me when you’re struggling with it, and let me hold you like this. That’s all. I want you to trust me.”
“Just—trust you?” She’d been melting ever so slightly, but at those words she pulled back, sudden and sharp. “You’re not being fair.”
“What?” He studied her face, the teeth sinking into her lower lip and the sheen in her eyes. “Why?”
“Because—because you have no idea what you’re asking me,” she said. “None. And I have no idea what you even want, not really—”
“Everything,” he blurted out. “Everything.”
“But I can’t give you everything! I already tried that, and it was—bad. It was dangerous. It was—”
“It wouldn’t be the same,” Will said desperately, holding her tighter. “You told me that. You told me that yourself.”
“A kiss is just a kiss, Will,” she said. There was a sadness in her eyes that looked centuries old, and he could feel her pulling away from him, like she was water squeezed between his grasping palms.
“Abbie—”
Bright headlights cutting through the snow, the low purr of an engine rising over the howling wind. He stopped, looked over Abbie’s shoulder as a car prowled onto Ms Tricia’s drive. Really, he knew who it was after a second of squinting, yet he held out hope that he was mistaken and this was a confused, midnight traveller who would soon realise his mistake and turn the fuck around again and leave Will to fix this, to fix the devastation in her eyes and that hopelessness in her voice that sounded like a crumbling heart.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go the way Will wanted. The car found a space, parked, and its engine cut out. Then the door opened, and Jason Farrell unfolded himself from the driver’s seat and peered over at them in the scarlet light.
“Oi,” he called cheerfully. “Are you groping my sister on the lawn? That’s a bit much, Will.”
“Oh my fucking God,” Abbie said.
Will really couldn’t agree more.
Seven