Can't Hold Back (22 page)

Authors: Serena Bell

BOOK: Can't Hold Back

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“Hunter?”

She was behind him, in the doorway.

He wheeled to see her standing there, looking small and scared. Her blue eyes big in her heart-shaped face, the simple straight blond hair making her look much younger than he knew she was.

There was something painful and intimate about her standing there, in the doorway of his bedroom, as if she belonged there, as if she’d stood there many times before.

“I know you need time. I don’t want to push. I just— When you left—”

He felt like he was on the edge of a cliff. That if she kept talking, he would plunge over it.

“You said—”

But he didn’t want to know what he’d said. He didn’t want to know what he’d promised or what she expected. He didn’t want to know anything at all. If she wasn’t a stranger to him, she was the very next best thing, and he didn’t want her confessions or her fear, the open rawness of her expression. He wanted her to close herself up and take herself away, because he was
not
who she thought he was. He didn’t know that man, the one she thought she knew.

He was someone else.

“I guess I just wondered. If you thought it still could be true.” She looked like she might be trying not to cry, and he cursed his lost self for whatever expectations he’d set up in her.

There was nothing for it but the truth now.

“I don’t remember,” he admitted. “I don’t remember what I said, or what we did—”

He took a deep breath.

“I don’t remember any of it.”