That wasn’t true. That wasn’t right. Naomi knew, the way she knew she could crush a man’s nose with the heel of her hand.
“I don’t understand.” She didn’t want to. For a terrifying moment, her body begged her to run. Muscles tensing. Ears ringing.Go. Go. Go.
“There isn’t...” He looked at the dark sky. Black with a beating heart. “The board had some concerns and I couldn’t...” Ethan swallowed and shook his head.
Oh. Calm descended over her. A padlock, clicking closed. She’d known somewhere, in her bones maybe, that this day was coming.
“It’s me.” Of course. “They fired you because of me.”
Ethan shoved his hands in his pockets. “Not exactly.”
Not exactly? Then that meant... “You quit?”
“I guess.” He scrubbed a hand across the back of his neck. “Yeah, I did.”
That was better. Less messy in a lot of ways. And it had only been a few hours, probably. So word might not have traveled far. The boardmight even still be in session, trying to figure out what to do. How to play this.
“Okay. Good.”
“Did you just say ‘Good’?” Ethan looked like he’d taken a softball to the chin.
It wasn’t exactly something they could play off as a misunderstanding, but between the board and maybe Clara, they’d think of something to make it right.
“I just mean it’s easier.”
Ethan flinched. “Is it?”
“Yes,” she said simply. Didn’t he get it? All that mattered was the board still wanted him. They just wanted him without Naomi. She could fix it this way. “You’ll just have to break up with me. That’s what they want, right?”
Ethan’s eyes went hard. “I don’t care what they want. I’m not going to break up with you. I love you.”
It was stunning, the way everything in her was dying, and that sentence still seeped into the dusty soil of her heart and gave it life.
“You love me?” Fuck. “Okay.” Breathe. Keep breathing. “Okay. You’re right.” It wasn’t really fair to ask him. Not after that. “I’ll have to do it.”
His backyard was so quiet. No sounds from the road. Just wind through the trees. Just her own frantic heartbeat in her ears. Ethan’s sharp inhale.
“Naomi.”
A sick sense of triumph pumped through her like adrenaline. Making her jittery, a twisted euphoria. She knew what to do. If she could just hold on to it. Seeing it through, righting this wrong, that would be enough. It had to be enough.
“I’m sorry,” she said, voice cracking against her will.Stop it. Stop.“We came close, didn’t we?” She needed to hear him say yes. That their love counted for something.
“We’re not—I’m not going back there,” he said. “It’s done.”
Naomi shook her head, indulged the impulse to kiss his frowning mouth and tasted salt. “No, sweetheart. It’s not.”
Ethan reached for her hand. “I need you.”
What dangerous words, and oh, how she wanted to keep them.
Naomi closed her eyes. She couldn’t look at him and keep going.
What was the name of that guy, the one who’d gotten stuck on a mountain with his arm trapped under a boulder? He’d had to saw through his own muscle, his own bone, with a pocketknife or something, to get free. To survive.
The human body must send something, some chemical, up to the brain, dulling the pain, the horror. And later, that same adrenaline cocktail must dissolve the memory too. Take care of making it hazy and dull. So people could forget, at least for a few moments, at least years later, that they’d ever had to swallow so much pain. Naomi was grateful for her body in a new way tonight. Grateful that after all this, she could surrender and let it carry her, all on its own.
She could do this. Could face the perfect temptation of having him join her as an outlier. Of them building a life together that made everyone else furious. She could deny the dream of that. The way it reinforced every truth she’d used to build her life.