Page 83 of Love You, Mean It

“And it’s not something whereyoucan just keep taking a back seat in your own fucking life,Theo. That might be fine for you, but it’s not gonna work for me.”

His eyes went so wide the whites showed all the way around.

“Excuse me?” His voice was so low it was almost a growl. But my blood was high now, the lingering sex flurries mixing with my anxiety over the business, a heavy pour of five-years-of-feeling-stuck topping it all off. I bared my teeth.

“Have you told Ted this deal can’t happen?”

“What?” He scoffed. “We’ve discussed this, the plan—”

“No, enough bullshit, I’m not one of your clients. Have you shown even the mostbasicamount of spine with him?”

Theo’s nostrils flared, hands tightening into fists on the console.

“You’re calling me a coward.”

“If the shoe fits.”

He sniffed out a laugh, the disdain on every feature eerily reminiscent of Ted.

“You want to talk about cowards, Ellie? Look in the fucking mirror.”

Now it was my turn to reel. My spine stiffened, body trying to defend against the blows I knew were still coming.

“I’m the one actually working to pull this off.”

“And why? Why even bother?”

“Youknowwhy, it’s my family’s legacy, the deli is—”

“No, fuck your family, Ellie, why areyoudoing this? Why even leave New York in the first place?”

“You know I had no choice.”

“Maybe at the beginning. But I’ve seen your books, you couldhave hired more staff years ago and you’d still clear a profit. At the very least you’d keep the lights on. You could be following yourrealdream. So why aren’t you?”

I guppied for an answer, but it wouldn’t come.

“Either you’re too afraid to go after the thing you really want—which is sad, you know?” His pitying sneer lanced through me. “Or maybe—and this is whatIthink is going on, for the record—you’re too chickenshit to admit thatthisis what you want.”

“I’m fighting for this, remember? In what world is that pretending it doesn’t matter?”

“You’re still whining that you were forced into it. Still living in a shitty apartment—I mean damn, I’ve seen collegedormswith better furnishings—just so you can keep pretending to yourself that all this, your entire fuckinglife,is just some temporary way station.”

Iknewhe was judging my apartment.

“You’re fucking insane,” I murmured, throat feeling like it might swell shut, like I couldn’t even breathe, because how had he seen that so clearly? How had I only just seen it myself when he’d spotted it from the start?

“And you’re fucking lying to yourself. I think you werethrilledyou got to give up the whole ‘trying to make it in the big city’ act. You’re just too embarrassed to say so because then you might have to admit you were actuallywrongabout something. Besides, it’s not like you really failed if the party line is that you were robbed of your chance to try, right?”

The edges of my vision were blurring, heart beating so hard it was all I could hear, my pulse palpable in my neck, my temple, the taut suspension of my breath. Rage burned through me, sucking up the oxygen, ravaging the barriers between my darkest thoughts and my words, because howdarehe reduce me to that? Even if he wasn’t entirely wrong—no,becausehe wasn’t entirely wrong.

“Thanks for the armchair psychology,Ted. Really means a lot coming from the man whose head is stuck so far up his father’s ass he can’t even see what he wants for himself.” My lip curled withdisgust. “I can’t even imagine how disappointed Chase would be if he could see you now.”

The air in the car seemed to go solid around us, and for just a moment, it felt as if we might linger there forever, amber-trapped by the viscous viciousness of my words. Then Theo turned away, Adam’s apple working wildly as the rest of his body practically shuddered with tension.

“Get out.”

“Theo, listen, I didn’t mean—”

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