World Enough and Time (31 page)

At that, he met my eyes. “You tell me.”

I dropped my gaze. “Look, I’m sorry about how, about…” I chewed my lip.
About what, Dani
? About walking away? Yes and no. It was an act of self-preservation, one with which I hadn’t intended to hurt him, but had done so nonetheless. I was sorry for hurting him, but not for saying no.

Clothing rustled when he shifted his weight. “Well, I can’t say it was the reaction I was expecting.”

I forced myself to look at him. “What was I supposed to do? After everything we’ve talked about, did you…” I stopped myself before I asked if he really thought I’d say yes.
He flinched. “I didn’t think you’d walk away.”

I let out a breath. “I’m sorry. I just… I freaked out. The whole thing caught me off guard.”

“I guess last night was just full of surprises, wasn’t it?” Was that bitterness? Or pain? Maybe both?

I gave an apologetic shrug. “Connor, you’re leaving in a week, I—”

“And I asked because I hoped you’d come with me.”

“We’ve been through this.”

“Yes, I know,” he said.

“None of this is easy,” I said. “For either of us. But this isn’t making it any easier.”

“I know.” His voice was little more than a hoarse whisper. “I guess I hoped…”

“You hoped what?”

He sighed, then shook his head and avoided my eyes. “Call me persistent, I just hate leaving without you.”

Sudden anger flared in my chest, but I couldn’t tell if it was genuine frustration with him or just a defense mechanism to keep the tears at bay. “So I’m supposed to just put my entire goddamned life in boxes and follow you? On a whim?”

“Follow me?” he said. “You make it sound like I just want to drag you along while I’m doing my thing. I want to be with you, Dani.”

“Funny, I’ve heard that before.” The bitterness in my voice startled me.

“And you think I’d do that to you?” He looked at the ceiling, then closed his eyes and exhaled. “Christ, I thought you knew me better than that.”

“I thought I knew him—”

“This isn’t about your ex, Dani,” he snapped, making me jump. “It’s about you and me. Nothing more.”

“And this was supposed to be something temporary,” I said. “Just something short-term, some fun together.” I swallowed hard. “Nothing more.”

His lips thinned into a bleached line. “It was supposed to be, yes.” He drew a ragged breath. “Except it didn’t quite work out that way, did it?”

“No, it didn’t. I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with you, but I did.” There it was. The crack in the dam. I’d said it to him countless times, but admitting to it here and now rattled me straight to the core. In a trembling voice, I added, “That doesn’t change the fact that we can’t do this.”

“What if we can?”

“We can’t. We’ve been through this.”
And Jesus, it hurts every time we go through it again
. “I can’t give up everything in my life and take the chance that in a few months, you’ll get bored with me and change your mind.”

“Dani, do you really think I’d suggest having you move to California with me if I thought for a minute that this was some fleeting, temporary thing? I even looked into—”

“I told you, I’ve heard that before,” I said. “You said yourself the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

He flinched, pursing his lips. “Maybe it is. You’re just forgetting that you’ve never heard it from me.”

“Not yet.” I cringed at the ice in my own voice, but it was the only thing keeping me in one piece.

“What makes you think I would ever do that to you?” he asked. “Give me one reason besides the fact that
he
did it.”

It was out before I could stop it: “What about
your
ex?”

His eyebrows jumped. “My ex? What about her?”

I swallowed. “You started seeing me very shortly after you left her.”

“I did, yes.” He paused, cocking his head. “What does—”

“If you can move on that fast from someone after that long,” I said. “How do I know you won’t get bored with me after a few months and walk away?”

“That was her,” he said. “This is—”

“Is different. Of course it is. How can I be sure it is?”

He stared at me, lips parted and eyes wide.

I blinked back tears. “How do I know you won’t wake up one morning and be over me like you got over her?”

He started to speak. Stopped. Looked away. More than once, he looked like he was about to say something, but didn’t. For the first time since I’d known him, he seemed completely at a loss for words.

Guilt pressed itself into my ribcage. “Connor, I’m—”

He put his hands up and shook his head. “No, forget it. I’ve heard enough.” He walked past me, carefully pulling his shoulder back so we wouldn’t accidentally touch.

“Connor, wait.” I reached for his arm but grasping only thin air.

With one hand on the doorknob, he looked over his shoulder. “No, there’s nothing more to say.”

“Please, there’s—”

“Let me rephrase that,” he said. “There’s nothing left to say that I care to hear. Enjoy Seattle, Dani.”

Before I could make another feeble attempt to keep him here, the slamming of the door echoed in my ears and through my silent, empty apartment.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

That night was just as restless as the one before, but I went to work the next day anyway. Though I was so exhausted my bones ached, I couldn’t stay in my apartment.

While I led Xena out of the barn, Gavin passed me in the aisle and said nothing. He didn’t even look at me. Another day and I still had a job, with no backlash in sight from our confrontation, and I didn’t care.

Though Xena was a handful and a half even when I wasn’t tired, I rode her first. Today, she was in one of her devious moods, when she would decide at the last possible second that no, she didn’t feel like going over that particular jump. When she was like this, I had to be completely focused, staying one step ahead of her, lest I end up in the dirt.

And that was perfect for my current state of mind. Concentrating on her meant not thinking about Connor. For the duration of my ride, my thoughts were consumed by lead changes, making sure we made it over every jump, and anticipating Xena’s every move.

When we were finished, we hadn’t even cleared the arena gate before Connor and last night came crashing back into my awareness. I was so tangled up in thoughts of him, I overshot the door to the barn, leading Xena right past it and continuing down the path beside the pastures. We were halfway to the back paddocks when one of the other mares called to Xena and she answered back.

I shook myself back into the present. I’d been aware, on some level, of where I was, but suddenly remembered where I was supposed to be. Sighing, I turned Xena around and we went back to the barn. At least if anyone saw me, they’d just assume I was walking her around to cool her down. They didn’t need to know she’d long since cooled down. It was a convenient excuse, one I’d use if the need arose.

I cross-tied Xena, unsaddled her, and went about grooming her. My brain couldn’t process all the simple tasks, but muscle memory took me through the motions, and eventually, Xena was back in her stall.

I hung her halter on the door, then picked up my saddle and shuffled into the tack room. That saddle was probably the lightest and least cumbersome piece of equipment I owned, but it still required a monstrous effort to heave it up onto the rack. A thick mixture of numbness and exhaustion congealed beneath my skin, turning even the simplest movements into slow, difficult tasks.

Susan appeared in the tack room doorway. “Hey, girl, you okay? Leslie said you hurt your back the other day.”

I watched my fingers play with the braided leather of a set of reins. “Just playing hooky.”

“Uh huh, so you—” She stopped. “Are you okay?”

I sighed. Turning away, I looked in the dusty mirror on the wall and decided my ponytail needed to be rearranged for the ninetieth time since I’d left the house. I pulled the elastic band out and focused my attention on gathering my hair up into it again. My arms ached and my fingers protested, but I forced both mind and body to obey.

“Dani, what’s wrong?”

Satisfied with my ponytail, I looked for something else to do with restless hands. “Just, some things…” I swallowed. “With Connor.”

She stepped inside the tack room, eyes wide. “What happened?”

I dropped onto one of the tack trunks, resting my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands. Tears threatened, but I forced them back.

“Dani?”

Taking a breath, I said, “He asked me to marry him.”

“He—” She shook her head, blinking rapidly. “He what?”

“You heard me.”

“Like, down on one knee?”
I nodded.

“Diamond in hand?”

Biting my lip I replayed the proposal in my mind for the thousandth time. An engagement ring hadn’t even occurred to me, and only now did I realize he hadn’t offered one. I shrugged. “Well, no, no diamond, but—”

“No diamond?” She cocked her head. “I’m surprised. I would have expected him of all people to pull out all the stops and—”

“Not that it matters,” I said through my teeth. “I said no.”

“
What
?” She almost shrieked, clapping a hand over her mouth and glancing over her shoulder in case someone was nearby. Then she turned back to me. In a loud whisper, she sad, “You turned him down?”

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s leaving soon. I can’t. And this was so sudden. Just, completely out of nowhere.”

She took a breath. “Maybe it was a heat of the moment thing. He wants you to go, so maybe this was his Hail Mary pass.”

I blew out a breath. There was only cold comfort in the possibility that Connor’s proposal had just been a desperate, last ditch effort to keep me. Maybe he’d known deep down I’d say no, but figured he had nothing to lose.

Rubbing the back of my neck, I said, “It’s a moot point anyway. He knows I can’t afford to take Jester and Calypso, and there’s no way in hell I’m leaving them behind.”

“Okay, fair enough,” she said. “Have you guys considered the long distance thing?”

I shook my head and stood. “We ruled that out a while ago.”

“You also ruled out any kind of relationship, but look at you now,” she said.

“Look at us now?” I laughed bitterly, the only thing I could do to keep the tears at bay. “More like, look at us up until the day before yesterday.”

Her eyes widened. “You two split over it?”

“What else could we do?” I didn’t feel the need to fill her in on everything we’d said the night before. Telling her meant hearing myself say all the things I shouldn’t have said. It meant reliving the moment he’d walked away from me just like I’d walked away from him.

Instead, I sighed and shrugged. “I said no, so we called it quits.”

“Are you out of your mind?” she asked. “Dani, he’s—”

“What am I supposed to do?” I snapped, tears blurring my vision. “I can’t go with him. He knows it, I know it. Why he asked anyway, I don’t—”

“Look, Dani, it may have been in the heat of the moment, but I don’t think he would just say it.”

“Maybe not, but could he really have thought it through?” I asked. “Maybe at that moment, he thought he meant it, but given a few hours or days or weeks to think about it, he might figure out it’s not what he wants. And where does that leave me? In San Francisco wondering what the hell I was thinking
again
.”

“Or you could be sitting in your apartment in Seattle wondering the very same thing.”

I clenched my jaw and let out a long breath. “How would that be different from the last few months?”

She sighed. “Dani, Connor isn’t Matt.”

“And I didn’t think Matt was like that either. I just can’t take that chance again, Suze.” I swallowed hard. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Susan sighed. “Except Connor isn’t the one who fooled you the first time.”

“No, and I’d rather not give him the opportunity,” I said.

“Dani,” she said. “I know the man. I know him very, very well.”

“You didn’t know he was the one who left his ex-fiancée.”

She shifted her weight. “Maybe not. But I…” She trailed off.

“See?” I said. “You didn’t think he’d leave her, let alone jump into another relationship with me before the ashes were cold.”

“Okay, maybe I don’t know everything there is to know about him,” she said. “but I do know that he’s a good guy. A really good guy. You could do a lot worse than taking the risk and going with him.”

“I could do a lot worse than staying here, too,” I said.

“Oh? Like what?”

I looked at her, then dropped my gaze. “Susan, I love him, but it’s over.”

“You don’t want it to be, though, do you?”

“I don’t want him to move to San Francisco, but he is.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

I swallowed hard, blinking back tears and starting toward the tack room door.

“Dani…”

Resting my hand on the doorframe, I looked at her. “The answer’s still the same.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

For the rest of the day, I forced myself to ignore all things Connor. I dried my eyes and threw myself into my job, doing everything I could to occupy myself with anything that wasn't him. Summoning every ounce of workaholism I could muster, I evicted his memory from my mind. Even during idle moments and down time, I focused on
not
focusing on him or the leaden guilt in my gut.

And for the most part, I succeeded.

Running on auto-pilot, I made it through the day. I could do this. It was over, Connor was gone, and just like I’d moved on from Matt, I would move on from him. I’d thought I couldn’t get over Matt, but I did, eventually replacing pain with cold apathy as a soundtrack to the memories we’d made.

I would do the same with Connor.

It was over.

Life would go on.

I would go on.

The cold truth, however, wouldn’t be denied, and it waited patiently until I was in bed. Until I let my guard down. Then it settled in and made itself known, molding itself against me as the emptiness where Connor used to sleep beside me. I’d slept alone plenty of times since we’d started dating, but there was a world of difference between “without him now” and “without him.”