He looked away; he wished Rose would leave him in peace. He closed his eyes.
“Say it to my face, Seth Thornton. Say you don’t care about me. Say you don’t love me.” Her voice rose with each word. “Because guess what? I love you. I love you so much that you’re breaking my heart right now.”
Seth’s eyes flew open at her declaration. Tears shimmered on her cheeks, and she was flushed and angry—and so goddamned beautiful that he wanted to fall at her feet.
“You can’t love me,” he said, his voice cracking. “You don’t know what you mean.”
“How dare you say that to me. Do you think I’m some stupid child? I know exactly what I mean.” Like she was lobbing a bomb at him, she said again, “I love you.”
He got up from the couch, running his fingers through his hair. He wanted to rip a hole in the wall, or scream, or maybe sob until he was nothing but a dry husk.
“You should go,” was all he said. His voice was cold, emotionless.
Rose laughed. “Of course I should go. That’s all that you’ve wanted, right? So you can be the great big hero. You know what? Take the offer. Go kill yourself in some godforsaken place, Seth Thornton. I’m not going to watch you do it.”
Her voice broke on a sob, and he watched in despair as she cried.
Right then, he hated himself, and he wished desperately that she would find someone better than him.
She got up, her fists clenched. “You know what you are?” she whispered. “You’re a coward. You’re afraid of what we have, and you’d rather throw it all away.”
“I’m not the one running, Rose. You are.”
“Maybe I am running. But at least it’s not toward my own death.”
The anger burst inside him like the fireworks from that evening. It spiked his blood, and with a quick grab, he yanked Rose into his arms. She gasped.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You have no idea.”
Her smile was so sad right then. “Don’t I?”
They stared at each other, their chests sawing for breath. The moment heated, expanded, until the tension made him tremble. He dipped his head toward her, needing her taste, her touch, but she pushed at his chest.
“Let me go.”
He hesitated. Then he freed her from his embrace.
“I’m going, just like you wanted. And I won’t be back.”
When she slammed the door behind her, he didn’t even flinch.
Chapter Eighteen
Rose entered her own apartment and stood in the middle of her living room. Her brain couldn’t compute what had just happened. She stared at the dirty dishes currently sitting in the sink, the mug on the coffee table where she’d left it this morning. It had seemed ages ago, drinking from the mug.
Callie whined and sat next to Rose. She whined again, but Rose didn’t respond.
It was over. After everything that had happened to her, she’d fallen in love with a man who didn’t want to fight for that love. He wanted to let himself fall deeper into his own doom, and she could do nothing about it.
A stray firework exploded some miles away; she flinched. She waited for a second one, and she breathed a sigh of relief when that seemed to be the only one.
She washed the dishes that had been sitting in the sink all day. She washed her face, brushed her teeth, got dressed for bed. Pulling out the futon, she realized that her pillow smelled like Seth. Exchanging it for another pillow, she almost screamed—all of her pillows smelled like him.
She rolled up a blanket and used that as a pillow instead. She tried to close her eyes and sleep, but it was pointless. Her mind wouldn’t settle. Over and over, she saw Seth tell her to go, tell her not to love him.
Rose squeezed her eyes shut. She heard someone gasping, like through a tunnel, only to realize a long moment later that it was her. She clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle the sound. She refused to let Seth know how much he’d hurt her.
Sleep, sleep, sleep, she chanted inwardly. If I can’t sleep, then I can’t stop thinking about what happened.
Yet her mind wouldn’t let any of it go. She went over every word, every expression, everything conveyed tonight. She felt like she was going to choke, and she finally sat up, coughing and panting. Tears burned her eyelids. That familiar friend—panic—climbed up her throat and threatened to strangle her.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she muttered. She put her head in her hands. Rocking back and forth, she chewed on the inside of her cheek to muffle the sounds of her sobs, but after a while, she couldn’t keep them contained anymore. Grabbing the rolled-up blanket, she buried her face in it and cried until her eyes were swollen and her head pounded.
She cried until she could barely rise to go the bathroom. When she saw her reflection in the mirror, she instantly switched off the light, but that one glimpse had shown her that she looked like she’d been dragged to hell and back again.
Rose returned to the futon and curled up into a ball. Stray tears leaked from her eyes, and she was too tired to wipe them away. Callie lay on the floor next to her the entire time, full of canine concern.
“I love him,” she whispered. “I still love him.”
This hurt more than what Johnny had done to her because she knew Seth cared for her. Loved her, even. Yet he’d turned his back on her when she’d made herself vulnerable and confessed her feelings. Even worse was knowing that he was punishing himself for losing Max. He’d accused her of being a coward, but if anyone was a coward, it was Seth.
Everything—Johnny, the money, the threats—seemed unimportant. She couldn’t bring herself to care. She knew she was going to meet Johnny tomorrow—or was it already today?—at the Sanditon Pass. She’d already set her alarm to get up early to catch the bus. But when before she would’ve been a bundle of nerves, now she was numb.
She began to fall asleep, but then she felt something solid drop into the palm of her hand. She opened her eyes to see that Callie had brought her that damn hummingbird figurine that Seth had let her keep. The tears sprang up again, and she burst into a second bout of tears. She clutched the figurine to her heart until she was so exhausted from crying that she finally went to sleep.
It was early afternoon by the time Rose arrived in the last town before you hiked up to the Sanditon Pass. As the bus traveled closer and closer to her destination, she began to feel the nerves again. The money in her jacket pocket, along with her gun, seemed inordinately heavy.
She took a deep breath, glanced at the directions Johnny had given her, and started walking.
It was about two miles into a wooded area, bursting with evergreens and wildflowers. The grass whistled in the breeze, dry and yellow from the summer dry spell, and if Rose weren’t walking to what she knew was her certain doom, she might have enjoyed the walk. When a butterfly fluttered past her, she had to stifle a hysterical laugh.
She’d done as Johnny had asked her: she hadn’t told anyone where she was going—at least not yet. She checked her phone to make sure she still had cell service, and she sent off a quick text to Heath. I’m at Sanditon Pass was all she wrote. By the time Heath saw the text, she’d be without service.