Shawn shuddered, the agony of her emotions overwhelming her. “Maybe I need to slow down. Maybe I need you to give me some space.”
He stiffened, then his hands fell away from her arms. “Do you want me to sleep on the couch tonight?”
She nodded. “I would appreciate that.”
“I’m only agreeing to this because I know you’re tired. We’re not done with this discussion,” he warned her.
That was the problem. Her anger spiked all over again. “We’re done with it if I say we’re done with it!”
He didn’t even respond to her. He just zipped his pants again, then started toward the door.
“My lawyer says I don’t need to be married,” she hurled after him, because the secret was weighing on her like ten thousand tons of concrete.
He stopped walking, but he didn’t turn around. “Is that true?”
“Yes. He said that I could contest the will and would most definitely win.”
When he turned around, his expression actually froze her in fear that she had just done something irrevocable. “Is that what you want?” he asked, and his voice was cold, even, devoid of any emotion.
“Maybe.” She was so deep in shit now, she didn’t know where to walk to get out of it.
Rhett slowly shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. You’re either in all the way, or you’re out all the way.”
She swallowed hard, not sure what to say, not sure what she felt.
“I don’t believe in hedging my bets, or taking it slow, or living separate lives that we invite each other into on occasion. If you love someone, ‘me’ becomes ‘we.’ That’s it. One car, two drivers.”
Could she do that? She didn’t know. She honestly didn’t know. “I can’t . . .” She wasn’t even sure what she was going to say, but Rhett sighed.
“Yeah, I guess I know you can’t. But the truth is, I can’t do this if you can’t commit to me. I love with everything, Shawn, not in bite-size portions. And I do love you.”
Anxiety crawled up her throat. Shawn opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She just stood there in her underwear and made nothing but a tiny nonsensical sound.
Rhett nodded. “I’ll sleep on the couch. Tomorrow I can move out.”
That startled her into speech. “Move out? What do you mean?”
“Well, what do you think we’re going to do? Float along, not totally committed to each other, playing house, each wondering when the other one is going to bail? I can’t do that.”
“But . . .”
“We had an agreement, right? Yeah, we did. But that was before I fell in love with you.”
“But . . .” Shawn didn’t know how to deal with this. She didn’t want him to move out. She would miss him. But she knew it was unreasonable to expect him to stay when she had no clue what she was doing or how she really felt.
“I don’t want you to submit to me. I want you to submit to love.” With that, he went out of the room, pulling the door closed behind him.
Shawn was left standing in the middle of the old carpet, wondering how to fix something when she wasn’t even sure what was broken.
• • •
RHETT woke up, his head pounding and his heart aching. He was slightly hungover and he had a crick in his neck from sleeping on the couch, but more painful than either of those was knowing that Shawn didn’t really want to be married to him. It had been on her face the night before at the party, in her panicked eyes, and the stiffness of her body. He had thought it was just nerves, but it wasn’t.
The truth was, she had learned to give in to her desire, to jump off the cliff and trust him, but she couldn’t trust his love, their marriage.
He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t stay there day after day wanting something more from her, trying to drag it out of her, until she withdrew and he resented that his needs weren’t being met.
Sitting up with a muffled groan, Rhett pulled on his dress pants and pushed off the blanket. Trying not to make any noise, he went down the hall and crept into the bedroom to find a shirt to wear. Shawn was sleeping soundly, her mouth open on a slight snore, her hands tucked under her cheek. He loved her with everything in him, and for that very reason, he knew he had to let her go. He would emotionally bleed her dry. She didn’t feel the same intensity of emotion that he did, and he couldn’t make her feel it.
Without opening the closet, he wasn’t going to be able to find any shirt other than the dress shirt from the night before, and he didn’t want to risk waking her up, given how rough the day before had been for her. So with a sigh, he pulled on the crumpled-up shirt and by the side door shoved his feet into his work boots. He would call Shawn later.
He left the house, but his heart stayed behind, tucked up beside the only woman he knew he could ever love.
• • •
NOLAN was in the kitchen, eyeballing the coffeemaker through bloodshot eyes, wondering how it was possible he was even awake when there was a knock on the apartment door.
“Eve?” he called. “Can you tell whoever that is to go the hell away?” It was his wife’s specialty, telling people off. Besides, she was closer, curled up on the couch, still where they had landed after the party, ripping each other’s clothes off and making pro wrestling look like a low-contact sport. They had never made it to the bedroom.
“My pleasure,” she mumbled.
As Nolan poured grounds into the filter, he heard the door open. Then Eve yelled back to him. “Uh, Nolan, it’s your brother. You might want to come in here.”
“What?” Nolan abandoned what he was doing and went into the living room in his underwear. Rhett was in the doorway wearing his rumpled wedding clothes, the shirt not even buttoned, his feet in boots, his hair standing on end, his face weary. “What the hell are you doing here? Did you get arrested last night or something?”
It was the only explanation his brain could produce for why his brother was dressed like that and at his apartment at eight in the morning the day after his wedding reception.
“Where’s Shawn?” Eve asked, wearing nothing but Nolan’s own dress shirt from the night before.
They were quite the trio of post-party fashion Don’ts.
“She’s sleeping still.” Rhett came in and shut the door, then fell into a chair, his hands going into his hair. “We broke up.”
Oh, Lord. Nolan was going to need coffee for this. “What are you talking about? You got married two weeks ago. Last night you were celebrating.” Though now that he thought about it, Shawn hadn’t exactly been a beaming bride. She had mostly sat and looked like she was mildly nauseated.