"After that first weekend. I never wanted you to leave. I knew you were mine forever. That hasn't changed, you know.” I rammed my shin into the coffee table. Deep down, I thought that it would probably hurt tomorrow. But right now, I wasn't feeling anything but love for Kate.
"Well, then things changed."
I shook my head, and the movement upended my balance. I staggered to the right.
"Sam." She grabbed onto me, righting me. Finally, she got me into her bedroom, pushing me until I crashed on the bed like a tree falling in the forest.
"Nothing changed. You're still mine for forever."
She undid the laces of my tennis shoes and tugged them off. "If you feel that way, then why are you trying to put me out of business?"
I shook my head again, but this time, my stomach felt like it was in the middle of the ocean during a storm. My hands gripped the sheets to keep me from falling overboard, or worse, throwing up.
"I'm not going to do that. I'm going to Hollywood."
"I suppose you have the looks to be a movie star." She left the room.
Panic welled up in me. We needed to resolve this. I needed her to see that we belonged together. "Kate!"
She returned with a glass of water. "Here, take these and drink this."
I couldn't sit up on my own, so she helped me up, and I managed to get the pills in my mouth and the water down before collapsing back.
Darkness hovered around the edges of my mind. I fought it, but I was losing. "Tell me, Kate, what do I need to do for you to give me a second chance?" I never heard her answer because the darkness won.
CHAPTERFOURTEEN
Kate
It was disconcerting to wake up to banging on the door in the middle of the night. When I looked through the peephole and saw it was Sam, I got angry. Why wouldn’t he leave me alone? I wished I'd stayed at the club until closing instead of having to deal with him.
I nearly didn’t answer the door, but I couldn't resist giving him a piece of my mind. But then he got this goofy smile and told me I was beautiful before falling into my arms. He was drunk. He was beyond drunk. It should've made me even more angry, but for some reason, it didn't.
Normally, I might have sent him on his way, but he was too drunk for me to trust that he could get back to his house safely, so I had no choice but to put him to bed and let him sleep it off. Unfortunately, the closest bed was mine.
I watched him for a moment as he slept. Or maybe he blacked out.
I reached out and pushed his blond hair off his forehead. "What are you doing, Sam?"
As we made the tumbling trip from my front door to the bedroom, he'd recounted the night we met, and my defenses weren't strong enough to keep the emotions away.
He told me before that it had always been him and me, but for some reason, tonight, drunk and earnest and desperate, I believed him. Or at least I wanted to. His words resonated with me. I felt the same. I yearned for what we’d had. I had loved him from the beginning as well. At the end of that first weekend, I hadn't wanted to leave either.
But how could I get past the fact that he left me? The way he left me? In a matter of minutes, everything that we had planned was gone. How could I know he wouldn’t do that again? Especially since I had no idea what happened between him and Sandra. Maybe I should have let him tell me, but I didn't want to know.
I remembered what Ethan told me about how Sam had been back months after he left, looking for me. Had things ended with Sandra back then? Or had his inability to find me meant that he'd gone back and created a life with her and her child?
Had he found me back then, would things be different now?
Would I have forgiven him then?
I looked down at him in misery. "Why are you making this so hard?"
I was tired and needed sleep. For a minute, I considered lying next to him. No. That wouldn’t be smart. Not if I wanted to keep my heart safe.
Leaving him to sleep, I exited my bedroom and went to the living room. I grabbed a blanket from the back of the couch and then lay down, covering myself.
One thing was certain. If he kept this up, he'd eventually wear me down. Deep down, that was what I wanted, and yet the idea of it terrified me. Confused and uncertain about what to do, I fell asleep.