His expression was bizarre, as if to
rn between confusion and concern. So much time had passed, yet I shook violently just as I’d done then.
“Why?” I demanded, my voice breaking with emotion. “Why’d you do that to me? Didn’t I mean anything to you?”
There was no sound in the room. Light bounced off the water’s surface, casting ripples of blue beams on him while he stood motionless, holding his glass of unsipped champagne.
Then, he blinked slowly. “You meant a lot to me, Ruby. A lot.”
Why didn’t he just stab me with a knife? It would have been less painful than his words. “Then, fucking why?”
He was calm, my total opposite, as I was coming unglued. Kyle took a tiny step forward, but it felt enormous, like he was right up against me. “The plan was to meet at your place,” he said quietly. “When I told you I’d be done loading my car in an hour, I think you misunderstood.”
Confusion coiled in my mind. “What are you talking about? We were going to meet at your apartment.”
His shoulders rose as he drew in a deep breath, and his expression turned sad. “Do you actually remember discussing it, though? Because, honestly, I don’t. I assumed you knew I was heading your way.”
I stared at him, trying to process. In a professional setting, we excelled at communication, but personally? It was never our strongest suit. Had we said specifically where we were meeting? I’d been so twisted up about saying goodbye . . .
Wait a minute.
Wait one fucking minute.
Had I spent the last five years hating him for a misunderstanding that might be my fault, at least partly? My tone verged on horror. “What are you telling me?”
“I drove over to your place,” he said. “I waited hours for you to show up so we could say goodbye.”
Shock cemented me into stone, and Kyle destroyed me all over again, but he didn’t seem to notice. He leaned over and clinked our glasses together.
“Cheers.”
Chapter
SEVEN
KYLE
It was a dick move, but I wanted to watch Ruby stomach some of her own medicine. I took a drink of my champagne while she simply stood there, dumbfounded.
Her recovery was quick, and her anger came right back. “I called you,” she accused. “I called you a bunch of times.”
“Yeah, you did.”
That seemed to piss her off more. “You didn’t answer.”
“When I first got to your place and you weren’t there, I thought it was because I was early. After a while, I got worried, and that’s when I discovered my battery was somehow dead.”
It wasn’t like I could ask to borrow someone else’s phone and call her. I didn’t have her number memorized.
“I couldn’t remember where I packed the charger, and my car . . . Everything I owned was in there. I had to tear it all apart to find it, right in the street outside your building.” My stomach churned with unease, like it had then. “Shit, I was worried about you the whole time, thinking any minute your car was going to turn the corner and we’d laugh about how stupid I looked with my shit all over the sidewalk. Only you never came home.”
Her eyes had gone impossibly wide, and she reached out, latching a hand on my forearm. The turmoil in her voice cut into me. “Because I was waiting for you at your place. I had no idea—”
“I knew you wouldn’t blow off saying goodbye to me,” I said, getting louder and more worked up than I meant, because this was the heart of my issue. “Hell, you’d told me you loved me, Ruby. So something awful must have happened to stop you from coming home.”
“Oh, God, Kyle—” Her face twisted with hurt.
“So, I finally found the charger buried in a box, and then got someone to let me into your lobby so I could plug into a wall outlet. As soon as I had enough power, I saw the twelve missed calls from you.” My hands had been shaking as my mind ran all sorts of awful scenarios. “And there was the one voicemail.”