“Will you delete it?” I asked quietly as he continued to stare at the phone.
“Am I a dangerous love or a safe one, Izzy?” he asked without answering me.
“I—” His dark gaze held mine, expecting me to know the answer. He wanted to know where we were going, as if we had anywhere to go at all. I knew my heart was lost to him, but I still tried to ignore it. “Aren’t we just having fun, Cade? You let Rodney in here because—”
“I let Rodney in here for your enjoyment. Not mine.” He immediately cut me off. “Don’t confuse my willingness to make you happy with how serious I am about you. I would’ve never have done that before.”
“We’re serious now?” He’d lost his mind. “What do you mean you wouldn’t have done that before?”
“Because I don’t share... except for you. For some reason, I’m inclined to make you feel good, even if it fucks with my head. I loved seeing you look alive while I watched, but don’t think for a second I’d let it happen again. You and I are done with others from this point on.”
“You don’t control that. If I want to go grab Rodney for a quickie—”
“It’ll be the last quickie he has before he dies a slow, excruciating death.” The threat rumbled out of him, so menacing I believed him.
“What are we doing?” I whispered, I asked, my heart beating so fast I swear my blood couldn’t keep up. “You’re talking like this is serious.”
“Is it not?” he asked, making me suddenly feel like I was the crazy one.
“What the hell would I tell our team out there?”
“The truth?” He shrugged.
“Didn’t you just hear me? I slept with an older man when I was sixteen, Cade.” I winced as I said it out loud. “The first time you met me, you called me an addict. Now I’m sleeping with my freaking boss. That doesn’t look real great for you.”
“I’m not too worried about my reputation.” He chuckled and leaned back against the wall to take me in. “What are you really scared of, Izzy?”
Did he not realize I could fall for him so fast and so hard that I’d never make it back to the surface? “Why do I have to be scared of anything? Why can’t it just be that this was fun and now we need to stop fucking around?”
“You ready to go back to bottling up everything you’re feeling?” He lifted his stupid dark brow.
“I’ve done it just fine over the years,” I blurted out, then I gasped at the words, slapping a hand over my mouth.
And there was that genuine smile of his when he pulled discomfort from someone, or when he cracked a fucking code or finished a stupid confidential project that he wouldn’t let me help him work on. “Exactly. And why do that another second when you’ve been fine letting it all go here?”
“Am I some sort of experiment to you?” I yelled. “I can’t gamble with this, with us, with any of it. I lost my first love because I was being reckless with my emotions and my behavior.”
“You lost him because he OD’d. He chose his own fate.”
“I could have stopped it,” I whispered.
“You can’t think like that. It’s like saying I could have stopped all the lives lost because my father. I could have stopped him.”
“But you did.” I pointed out.
“I could have done it sooner.”
“Do you really think like that?” I wondered if he took blame like so many children took on their parents’ sins.
“No.” He shook his head. “We can’t change someone’s path once their mind is made up. You can’t go back and rewrite his story or think of the what-ifs. It’s why you shouldn’t try to scramble that letter into something it’s not. You accept what people have done and respond to it in the way that’s best for you.”
“Is that what you did with your father?” I asked quietly, trying to understand him maybe like he was trying to understand me.
“Yes. We gave him what he deserved.” He stopped for a second to glance at his phone. “With Vincent, it seems you can only respond by writing him back, huh?”
“Like a letter?” I squinted at him.
He shrugged. “Maybe.”