Page 87 of The Hookup
She clearly didn’t think anything of the gifts. Escape was his best option.
“Call you? When I’m able to have sex again, you mean?”
Her words hit him like an axe slicing clean through him, and he couldn’t work out if she was mad because of her time of month, or because she was just generally annoyed at him.
“That’s not…that’s not what…”
“But you’ve come here for a reason,for sex,” she said, spitting the words out as if they tasted bitter. “Why else do we see one another? What else do we have?”
Goddamnit. Talk about walking into the eye of a hurricane. A sinking feeling collected in his stomach. This was the last thing he needed, after the kind of week he’d had. Who the hell needed this shit? Not him, that’s for sure. Not when he’d done the decent thing and come to see her, with gifts and with the intention of making it up to her.
She hadn’t even given him a chance.
Every instinct in his body told him to turn and run, but her standing there, looking so miserable and pitiful, made him feel sorry for her again.
Why couldn’t she be like the others? Playful and laughing.
A tease.
Why couldn’t she be the way she had been on the island, and in the earlier days when she had come to the bar looking for him?
“What else do we have?” he asked, incredulous, his anger beginning to rise. “You knew what this was going in,” he flung back at her.
“Yes I did, and, like I said, I’ll call you when I’m fuckable again.”
He jerked his head up in surprise, his eyes settling on her face. She never usually swore, and right now, she looked pretty pissed. This wasn’t at all how he had expected this evening to go. Gritting his teeth together, he considered going over to her, and comforting her. And then he wondered if women routinely turned into banshees when it was their time of the month, or if they merely showed their true colors.
“You do that.”
He left, closing the door behind him and walking away as fast as he could, even though it didn’t feel right to be walking away when she was obviously hurting about something.
Turn around, make it better. Don’t leave her like this.
But if he turned back and apologized, and tried to be there for her, she would think of a happily-ever-after future, and that was not in his life plan.
Christ, it was difficult enough acknowledging that his feelings had changed, but too many moments like this, full of conflict and headache, made him wonder if he could go the distance.
He wasn’t ready for the emotional landmines. Couldn’t suffer more of the explosions blowing up his world all over again.
Emotional involvement? It had always been a no-no, itshouldhave been a no-no even now. He didn’t need this level of complication in his life, and he should have walked away. Even after that first pity-fuck.
~ ~
She wasn’t pregnant. She’d come on last night, and the hope she had been carrying around with her had died at the sight of her blood. She hadn’t realized the depth of her sadness until now; hadn’t realized how deep her desire had been that she might be pregnant. It didn’t matter that it would have been Luke’s—given how she felt about him now, but the idea that shecouldbe pregnant had given her an inner strength she had started to cling to.
And just like that, her hopes had crashed and burned. She’d been in a dark mood even before Luke had arrived at her door.
She should have ended it. If she’d had her wits about her, she would have, but the truth was, she couldn’t think straight. Luke arriving at her place had made things difficult. Complicated. Unbearable. If he’d had any regard for her feelings, he would have stayed with her, and it was clear that he had no feelings for her at all.
He’d come here to have sex. Nothing more.
She had been so wrong to think he was changing, that he was starting to feel something for her. The wedding had hit a nerve, and weakened his defenses. That glimpse into the type of man she liked to think he was, was just a glimpse, nothing more. The real Luke was this man—callous, and selfish, and inconsiderate.
She wanted intimacy, but he wanted sex.
A gargantuan void stood between them, and the gap would never close.
Maybe it was just as well that she wasn’t pregnant.
