Yes, you do. I took the box of roses from her, and the knife, and claimed a place opposite her on the floor. My throat burned with a thousand confessions, but I kept quiet as we worked. I knew her. She’d have no focus until this was done. Much had changed about both of us, but not that.
Gus came back when I was halfway through my task, brandishing a box of fifteen shaved lampshades.
Mia leapt to her feet, flower detritus spilling everywhere. “Oh my God, you’re my fucking hero. These are perfect.”
Gus snorted. “Right. Because I was the one who noticed what you’d lost in the first place.” He jerked his head at me. “These are Luke’s. I’m just the loadie.”
Mia turned to me. “How did you know?”
I repeated what I’d told Gus. She nodded as though everything suddenly made sense and stepped up to kiss my cheek.
Her lips lingered, her breath warm against my skin. “You always were a details boy.”
Despite it all, something about her tone fired me up. I sucked in a breath, picturing what I’d do to her if her brother wasn’t stink-eyeing me from across the room, until Gus cleared his throat.
“Whatever,” he groused. “Are we nearly done here?”
Wishful fucking thinking. It was gone three a.m. by the time Mia was persuaded there was nothing more she could do.
We put the shop back together, and cleared out the van. Thankfully, the refrigeration was still functioning, but I had work to do in the morning to make the smashed window safe. I helped Mia pack the new batch of wedding flowers into the shop fridge, then I ran a security check on the windows and doors. When I was done, I found Mia alone in the back room.
“Gus has gone,” she said. “I told him I was coming home with you.”
“You let him go on his own?” I didn’t want to say it out loud, but if whoever was targeting her was gunning for me, there was a chance they had Gus in their sights too.
“He took my car,” she said. “He drove it here earlier, and he’s not going home.”
She didn’t have to say any more. Before Mia had returned from France, Gus had rarely spent a night alone. For a man who dodged commitment, he sure loved company.
I stepped closer to Mia. “So...you want to come back to my place?”
She shrugged. “Whatever. We’ve got a conversation to have, remember? I don’t care where we have it.”
It was the middle of the night, and she had to be up at first light to begin her delivery round, but suddenly I couldn’t wait another second. Ten years was long enough.
I took her hand and led her out of the shop, waiting while she locked the back door, and then triple-checking it myself. Then I claimed her van keys and drove us back to my place—a risky game with no insurance, but she was exhausted, and I was past caring about anything but getting her home to my bed.
At my house, we took bottles of cider straight upstairs, but unlike every other time we’d made the journey, we were still clothed when we reached my room.
I shut the curtains and gestured to the bed. “You wanna sit down?”
Mia rolled her eyes. “For now. I’ll have to get up again when I’m looking for something to throw at you.”
“You think it’ll come to that?”
“It always comes to that these days—fucking or fighting. It’s all we have.”
She was so wrong. If everything we’d done since she’d come back had been nothing more than sex and aggro, it would be easy to walk away from. Easy to leave her to her life and go back to mine. But nothing about us had ever been easy. I’d reached adulthood believing that was what made it worth it. Now?
Now there was nothing I wouldn’t endure to be with her, I just had to tell her.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mia
He was staring at me like I had all the answers already. As if I had the first clue what he was thinking. Frustration rushed through me, and I clawed at it in a desperate attempt to keep it inside. My temper couldn’t help me now.
I toed my shoes off and sat on the edge of his pristine bed. “You said you were ready to talk. So talk.”
Luke sighed and ran a hand through his messy hair. He was tired, I could tell, but so was I. Tired of waiting and wondering. Of guessing games that led nowhere but heartache. “Come on,” I said softly. “Whatever you have to say can’t put us anywhere worse than we’ve been before.”
“I know that.” He kicked his boots to the corner of the room and cringed at the mess.
It was comedy gold, and laughter bubbled out of me, breaking the smog-like tension. “Pick them up,” I said. “We won’t get anywhere with your eyeballs twitching the whole time.”
He gave me a flat look but sloped over to the boots anyway and placed them in the wardrobe. “I don’t usually bring my shoes upstairs.”
“I know.”
He came back to the bed and sat beside me, his shoulder nudging mine as he reached out and took my hand, watching our fingers twine together like it was the most fascinating thing in the world. “I have so many things I want to say, but the words never come when I need them. That’s why we always end up fucking, and why I wrote you that pathetic letter in the first place.”
“The letter isn’t pathetic. I was just too caught up in myself to understand why you never gave it to me.”
“I was scared.”
“I know.” And I knew he still was. That whatever his heart felt was so terrifying he’d almost always opted for silence instead. “We don’t have to see each other anymore if it’s easier for you. I mean, we can’t totally avoid—”
He cut me off with the most chaste kiss we’d ever shared, then pressed his finger to my lips. “Don’t. I don’t want that.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to know I love you, and tell me you love me back.”
“That’s easy.”
“Is it?”
“Of course it is. We’re halfway there with that sentence. The tough part is meaning it.”
“I do mean it.”
“Do you?”
He squeezed my fingers so hard my bones protested. “Yes.”
“I love you too. Just in case you hadn’t figured it out yet.”
“I’ll never figure you out.”
I laughed softly. “Perhaps you’re not meant to.”
A companionable silence fell over us for a while. I leaned against him and absorbed the first certainty I’d had in a decade that he really did love me. But pessimism was an evil mistress, and the reality that love had never been enough was hard to ignore.