Page 120 of Text Me Baby One More Time

“No you can’t.”

“Can too, ass.”

“Ass? Is that any way to talk to the guy who gave you a wild night of pleasure?”

“You might have fucked me, Shep, but I’m still a little mad at you.”

The wordfuckleaving her lips makes my dick jump, and this issonot the time for that shit.

I clear my throat. “Why’s that, Den?”

“For then. For screwing up our dibs. For making me chase after you and then abandoning me.”

“I—”

“You never told me why.”

I dare a peek at her. She’s still resting against the window, eyes still closed like she can’t look at me for this conversation, and I can’t say I blame her.

I kind of want to kiss her for it because I don’t think I can stand to look at her right now either.

“I was scared.”

“I was scared.That’s your big reasoning for pretending I didn’t exist when I packed my life up and moved across the country for you? Leaving me completely on my own and scared out of my mind?” The irritation in her voice is clear.

“It’s the truth, Den. I told you last night I was scared to go through what my mom did. I was fucking terrified as shit that I could fall in love with someone I’d never met before, frightened out of my goddamn mind that someone could mean so much to me.” I squeeze the steering wheel tighter. “The only thing I was ever passionate about was baseball. That was it for me. That’s all it was ever supposed to be.”

“We were young, Shep. You had your whole life for baseball.”

“I had my whole life for love, too. I wasn’t supposed to find it then, not when I had a career ahead of me, a future I couldn’t dream of wrecking.”

“Yet you almost did last month…without me. You could have had meandbaseball,” she argues.

I shake my head. “Not then. I couldn’t afford the distraction. It was either go after my lifelong dream of playing in the big leagues or chase after a girl I’d never met.”

“I hate the way you say that,” she says in a small voice. “Like what we had didn’t mean anything.”

“It meant everything, and that was the scariest part of all of it,” I tell her honestly. “If it had come down to it, I would have walked away from my dream for you. That scared me to no end.”

“You wouldn’t have walked away from baseball.”

I laugh. It’s dry and dark and sad even to my own ears. “But I already had.”

She sits up in her seat, finally looking up at me. “What do you mean?”

“I was recruited by another school with a better team.”

“What!” she yells so loudly she wakes Steve, who begins scrambling up her chest, whining like mad.

She cuddles him close. “Shh, shh. Sorry, buddy, didn’t mean to scare you. Your dad just dropped a big, unexpected goddamn bomb on me and I’m about two seconds from kicking his ass.”

“I could totally take you,” I tell her.

She glowers at me. “Don’t test me right now, Shepard.”

Denny scoops Steve into her arms and slides him into the crate in the back seat. She tucks a blanket around him and closes the door, not turning back to me until he’s snuggled in tight.

Spoiled little shit.

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