Mac chuckled. “Thoughtful of you.”
Her face crumbled at the memory, but she pushed aside the sudden heartache. “We had a quirky sense of humor.”
“We?”
Concentrating on the bottle again, she admitted, “I’ve lost some of it since. Maybe it was his all along. Maybe that’s something I’m still figuring out; which part of us wasusand which part of us wasme. We were seamless together, so it’s weird.” Sighing, she said, “But he wasn’t perfect. I’m not perfect.Weweren’t perfect.” She looked at him pointedly.
Mac raised a brow. “Outside looking in, seems pretty perfect.”
“Well, he’d tell you my temper was overly dramatic, and I liked to throw and destroy things when I was angry… Still do, actually.” She thought of Roman’s bouquet, and the petals smashed into the tiles after her vicious swipe from the coffee table. “Plus, I’m a terrible planner. Meanwhile, he could be an idiot about things you’d think was common sense, oh, and he was stubborn.” She picked the corner of the label again. “So damn stubborn.”
Flicking her gaze out over the sparkling waters, she expanded, “He’d been having headaches for a while. They’d get intense; go away. They’d get so bad his vision would blur. I begged him to go to the doctor, but he wouldn’t do it. He blamed the deadline’s stress or said it was excitement about the baby; he said it was no big deal. We both thought of migraines; maybe it was hereditary. We didn’t know much about his family; he grew up in foster care. We both did.”
Mac looked at her like this was new information. Maybe it was for him.
“If only,” she said, shaking her head. “Fucking stubborn man.”
Mac moved his arm to put it around her, but she ducked away. She didn’t want to be comforted; she didn’t deserve it. There was so much self-loathing accompanying it, the guilt and the blame. But he wouldn’t let her do it. Grasping her arms, he yanked her back into his embrace, holding her in a band of steel. “It’s not your fault.”
“No, it’shisfault! Hechosethat.” Her voice cracked before she took a deep breath, pushing away the pain. “He chose that, and I don’t know what to do with it.Perfectmen don’t let go.”
“He couldn’t have known what he was choosing.” Mac cradled her, rocked her once, his mouth to her ear as he said gently, quietly, “But for you, Cassidy, you let go back. You need to let go of him.”
Tears sprung to her eyes as she fought his hold. “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this, Mac.” Didn’t want to think about it, feel it, not while in his arms, not while he presented a whole other realm of sensation and confusion.
“Okay, it’s okay,” he soothed. “But stop fighting me. You don’t have many options right now anyway unless you jump.”
She calmed, snorting in the process at the ridiculous suggestion. “I’m not jumping.”
“Good.”
“You’d never make it back.”
He chuckled. “Thank you.”
Relaxing into his hold, letting him pull her back against him as he kept a secure arm around her waist while he stroked her arm with his knuckles, she rested her head against his shoulder. “You confuse me,” she admitted.
“I’m pretty simple.”
“You aren’t,” she responded plainly. “I think you want others to think that.”
He shrugged. “I eat, I drink, I fuck. Simple.”
Cassidy shook her head. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe it’s that simple for you. You feel more than you let on.”
“Why?” he challenged lightly, tilting his head to look at her. “Because when I fuck you, you feel it here?” He reached around and tapped her sternum. “That’s howyou’redesigned, not me.”
“Where do you feel it, Mac?” she demanded, the organ he was indicating leaping inside its cavity.
He shifted, reaching between them. “Here.” He grabbed his crotch, glancing at her before turning his face away.
Cassidy peered in between the space behind the shades to his eyes from the angle she was at and asked softly, “Then how can you make it feel so real?”
His brow knit, his eyes shifted to her so quickly, she wasn’t even sure he’d looked at her. Her question had taken him so momentarily off guard, if she hadn’t been watching him, she wouldn’t have seen him startle. He said sadly, “Oh, sweetheart, that’s what I meant.”
“Right,” she said softly.
He shot her a skeptical look but returned his attention outward again.