She wouldn’t.
“How can you honestly think that what we have is healthy or right?”
“I don’t think us being together is any of those things, Peaches.”
Her eyes snapped to me.
“It’s just inevitable.”
She straightened. “Help me to understand, Jax. If I can understand, I can move forward. I can shake this thing we have or accept it. Or something.”
“No.” Maybe she wanted me to sugarcoat something but that had never worked before with us. I wouldn’t lie to her and tell her we could be healthy and perfect now.
We were a fucking mess, and I wouldn’t be able to fix it with the shit I was doing. I knew that, and I had a pretty damn good feeling she knew it too.
Her jaw set. And before I could steel myself, she closed the distance between us, placed her hand on my chest, and slid it up to my neck. Her finger went to my pulse point as she stared up into my eyes. Every emotion I saw in her swirled and collided.
I glanced at her parted lips as she stretched onto her tiptoes to be closer to me. My hands moved to her hips to pull her closer and she came so naturally that I couldn’t see past the face that her small body seemed to mold perfectly to mine.
“Why not?” she whispered, her breath on my lips and I could swear I tasted her. Her desperation, her heartache, her desire to be over this hurdle so she could be with me. I had it all there, mesmerizing me.
“Because this is one thing I need to do for you, Peaches. You don’t control it and you don’t meddle in it. I want you out of it until it’s done.”
She recoiled from me faster than a rattlesnake that had bitten someone. Our connection broke and so did the damn spell she had just cast on me. “So, this is an elaborate plan of some kind?”
I looked down at my hands, still in the air from holding her hips, and clenched them. I stalked toward her as she backed up toward the entrance of the house. “So, you’re using your body to fucking bait me now?”
“Are you calling me bait?” she practically spit.
I stopped directly in front of her in the foyer of Jay’s home, her hand on the front door, ready to leave. I let her look up at me to make sure she understood who was calling the shots. “I’m calling it like I see it. You wanted me vulnerable.”
“Well guess what, Jax? I’m always vulnerable in this situation because you don’t tell me anything about your visits with my father. I talked to him years ago, you know that?”
I knew but I didn’t say anything.
“Of course, you knew.” She shut her eyes for a second like she couldn’t bear the conversation. “I asked him what you visited him for. And you know what he did? He laughed. He laughed so hard, I almost hung up right then. But I asked again, hoping he’d tell me. Can you believe that? I saw hope in the person I hate most in this world because the person I loved the most had left me with no hope at all.”
She waited a beat for me to say something.
I didn’t. I couldn’t. I wanted to console her but knew it wouldn’t matter. She would take no consolation except the truth of my visits, and I couldn’t give her that.
She sighed. “He didn’t tell me anything. He just told me to never ask again and if I did, he’d ignore me. I wrote a few letters, all asking the same question again and again. He didn’t answer. When I’d call him, he wouldn’t take my calls. When I tried to visit him, he wouldn’t come to see me. I find it hard to believe that he’d pull out all those stops unless you were behind it.”
I wanted to scream at her for trying any of those things. I knew they’d happened. Frank was candid about her trying to get answers. This wasn’t her fight though.
It was mine. And I meant to keep it that way. “Let it go, Peaches.”
“You don’t get it, L.P.” She shook her head as she opened Jay’s front door. “I’ve tried to forget. If we could forget everything …” She looked down and sighed. “I’ve tried to let it go. To let it go means I have to let you go too. And for some reason, I just can’t seem to do that.”
She walked out and slammed the door.