“How am I being stubborn?”
“Because you’re still here! Because you won’t fucking leave!”
“I lost you once, Cillian O’Sullivan,” I rasp. “I won’t lose you a second time.”
He stops short and stares at me for a moment.
I turn away from him. I can’t handle the heat of that gaze. Not ever. But especially not right now, when everything is teetering on a knife’s edge.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he says softly. “It’s just that sometimes…”
“Sometimes what?”
“Sometimes, I swear it’s like you’re in love with me.”
My heart is hammering hard, giving me advice that I’ve never truly listened to. It would be so easy to refute him, correct him.
Me? Love you? Not in a million fucking years.
But the feeling of impending doom seems to put things in perspective suddenly.
Does my pride really matter in the face of death? Will I regret it if Cillian dies with my lie ringing in his head?
You promised yourself you’d stop being a coward. You promised.
So I raise my eyes to his and keep the promise I made to myself.
“That’s because I am in love with you.”
I can see the shock in his beautiful blue eyes. The shock of a man who denied himself a dream because it hurt too bad to even imagine it.
It makes me smile. An actual, honest-to-goodness, albeit one that’s still deciding whether to be happy or sad or scared or something that doesn’t yet have a name.
“I never stopped,” I add. “Not for a moment. Part of me never left that roof.”
Cillian just continues to stare at me until I shuffle on my feet and look away.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” I demand. “For God’s sake, say something.”
But he doesn’t.
For once in his entire goddamn life, Cillian O’Sullivan is silent.
Maybe it’s because he said everything he wanted to say thirteen years ago. And since the moment fate brought us back into each other’s worlds, we’ve been pretending that what we felt that night didn’t happen, or that it was somehow not real or not valid.
This, though? This heat, this tension between us?
It proves that it was real. It proves that it was valid.
It meant something.
It mattered.
Somehow—I don’t know when it happened—he closed the gap between us and our bodies are pressed up against one another now.
There’s no uncertainty or trepidation. I’ve said my truth and it feels good.