I went down the hallway and opened her door, fisting my hands at my sides and breathing in through my nose and out of my mouth.
She didn’t call out after me.
She didn’t change her mind about me leaving.
I felt Rip’s presence, heard the door slam shut behind us. I bit the inside of my cheek and jogged down the stairs, not running but not walking. And when I hit the first floor, with Rip’s steps close by, I stopped there, giving him just enough room to go around me.
I wasn’t going to feel bad. I was going to be happy. I was fine.
My hands went to my hips, and I took a deep breath in through my nose, feeling myself shaking my head more than actually being aware of the decision that I did it.
There was no way for me to ignore the subtle but sharp pain going on right in my solar plexus as I stopped there.
“I just need a minute,” I told Rip quietly, still in front of him so that he couldn’t see my face.
His “all right” was just as low and soft as my request had been, but I was in no condition to analyze it in any way.
I nodded, hoping he’d seen it, and I started walking again.
I was choosing to be happy. I was choosing to be happy. I was—
Not.
I wasn’t happy. I couldn’t even wrangle a little bit of it. Not a speck of it.
My feet took me into the parking lot, past Rip’s truck. They took me down the middle of the lot in the muggy Dallas air. I walked to the end of the building and back, breathing in through my nose and out of my mouth, shaking my head every once in a while. The entire time, not letting myself think about how sad and hurt I felt. Not letting myself think of how not happy I was in that moment.
I tried with everything in me to force my mind blank as I turned around and walked back in the direction I had come.
I wasn’t going to cry. I wasn’t going to get upset.
This was not the worst thing that had ever happened to me. My sister telling me I couldn’t stay with her. My sister referring to me as her half-sister. My own fucking sister not wanting me around for whatever reason.
I had driven out here because she had asked. Not because I expected anything.
But I had expected more than to get sent home after ten minutes of being inside her place after she’d called me upset.
I specifically didn’t let myself think of how she had disregarded me.
Pushed me aside.
I bit the inside of my cheek again and cracked the knuckles of my hands as I kept walking.
Rip didn’t care. He would never shame me for what happened or make fun of me, I knew that in the center of my bones.
Nope, this burn had nothing to do with him.
Nothing.
One single tear slid out of my eye and right along my nose, brushing the side of my mouth as it kept slipping down and over my chin.
I blinked.
She hadn’t even tried to hug me.
After everything—
She didn’t even bother wanting to take a second and talk to me. Just in and out. Out you go. Bye.
I squeezed my hands harder into fists as I approached Rip’s truck and found him leaning against it, arms crossed over his chest, him watching me. His face was blank, for all intents and purposes. He even had one foot crossed over the other.
I tipped my head back to look at the sky, covered in charcoal gray clouds and lit up by city lights.
And I took a deep breath.
Then I took another.
But those breaths didn’t do a single thing.
Not one single thing as another tear escaped my eye and followed the track the first one had left for it.
This croak built up in my throat, and my instincts tried their hardest to keep from letting it out. I even had my mouth closed, but this tiny sound escaped, sounding like a whine. Sounding pathetic and sad and like a note something made when it broke.
And another tear came out.
Then another.
And another closed-mouth noise escaped.
“One more minute,” I slipped out, sucking in a shuddering breath that probably mutilated the words and had them sounding like something totally different.
I heard his “all right” just as I sucked in another breath, just as another tear slid out of my eye.
I had no reason to cry.
My sister loved me, I knew it. She was just… I didn’t know what she was doing or why she was being that way.
Sometimes you outgrew people.
Maybe that’s what she had done. Moved on from her high-school dropout sister who painted cars for a living. Her half-sister since that’s how she thought of me now.
And it was that half that was the prick I needed for more tears to roll out of my eyes. One after another, after another, until I had the meaty parts of my palms tucked into my eye sockets, diverting the flow of one traitorous tear after another.
“Luna,” came the deep, deep grumble of a voice.
“Fifteen seconds,” I tried to tell him as I told myself to stop. Stop.
Stop, Luna.
You’re fine.
Quit being dramatic.
You’re taking this too personal.
Stop it.
I’d swear I heard a muttered “Fuck” from somewhere too close, but I could never be sure.
What I could be sure of was the body that stepped right up to mine. The body that didn’t give me a chance to stop crying or even drop my hands because that body wrapped itself around my own. An arm curled over my shoulder, another right below it, draping itself across my shoulder blades.
The body was warm and hard and molded to mine, crushing my arms between us like they weren’t even there in the first place.
Legs and thighs pressed against me, and something warm grazed my cheek as gentle, almost delicate words filled my ears. “It’s all right, baby girl,” they started.
“You’re a good girl.”
“A nice girl.”
“The nicest.”
“Sweetest.”
And more tears just came right out of my eyes with each thing said into my ear, spilling over my fingers and wrists, down my arms as I stood there, letting my boss, a man who barely talked to me on a good day, hug me and tell me I wasn’t a sad, pathetic person who deserved to feel so small.
You’re such a dumbass, Luna, my dad had told me so many times, it sounded like he spoke the words into a tap that sent him directly into my brain.
“You got your ‘love you’ bracelet on. You’re all right.” The arm closest to the top, directly over my shoulders, tightened, and warmer, soothing words tried to drown the old ones away. “I’ve got you. I’m here,” the man holding me said.
He had me.
Maybe just for a minute. Maybe for ten. And even though I knew it was dumb and that I had no right to and I needed to get it together, I leaned into him. I went a little limp against his body, even tilting my head forward until it rested right between his neck and collarbone.
For one moment in time, I let Lucas Ripley hold me up while tears just dropped out of my eyes, making the ones I’d shed in my bedroom after my grandmother’s funeral seem like nothing.
All I had ever wanted was to be loved.
And one of the only people I had expected to give me that unconditionally for the rest of my life had let me walk right out of her place, without as much as just... talking to me about how school was going. Or work. Or anything.
We had driven all the way over here and….
One of the arms around me moved, and what had to be his hand landed on the back of my head, fingers dipping into my hair, running through the ends before coming back up to do it all over again.
“Ten more seconds,” I mumbled into my hands, into his shirt, into him.
“Ten more seconds,” he agreed into my cheek, his hand cupping the back of my head again.
I sucked in a breath through my nose and pressed my face even closer into the high point of his chest, feeling bones and hard muscles beneath it—a reminder that this man was immovable. Tough. Hard. Even leaning into him with more of my weight than I had ever let someone support, he held it without an issue.
His fingers worked their way through my hair to touch my nape.
Those rough, calloused fingers worked their way to straddle the back of my neck, to hold my head in place, right where it was.
Thea loved me. I knew it. But it didn’t feel like it. It didn’t feel like it.