20
Izzy
My gut wrenched, my heart breaking all over again at the thought of telling the man I was falling for about the first man I’d ever loved.
“It was just a way of him saying goodbye to me.” I tried to brush it off even though my body shook with the pain of remembering that day, his written words, his lifeless form.
“That all it said?” He stepped close, caging me in against the hallway wall.
“I can’t say it out loud,” I whispered, about to break. My body shook from trying to hold in my sobs, trying to overcome the emotion that fought to escape. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
This could have been the moment Cade broke me. He could have told me to buck up or said this was why he didn’t trust me with more at work.
He could have said so many things. But he didn’t.
As he stared at me, his hand came up to rub my cheek. He didn’t look through me or glance away from me. He held my gaze like he wanted more. He wanted everything. He wanted my soul, and he couldn’t hack into my mind to get it. Here, he had to ask if he wanted this side of me.
And I had to say yes.
He held out his phone. “If you can’t talk about it, put it in writing on a screen and let me read it.”
I took my time typing in his Notes app, tears streaming down my face. Yet, Cade wiped them away, one by one, over and over again. Patiently, softly, caringly.
Line 1: I won’t say this is a love letter, because it’s not.
Line 2: But if I were to have written one, it would have been about you.
Line 3: So, don’t blame yourself.
Line 4: You’re too good for this place by me.
Line 5: I probably should have let you go before all this.
Line 6: But I couldn’t. You were the only one who loved me.
Line 7: All that love around you. I just wanted a sliver.
Line 8: It fucked with my head and made me weak, so weak I held onto you.
Line 9: You think I’m strong to do this? Or a coward?
Line 10: Maybe if I tell you to move on, I’ll be strong but . . .
Line 11: I’m too jealous and our love ain’t healthy
Line 12: Get a love that isn’t dangerous like ours
Line 13: I’m sorry for the mess.
Line 14: But I’m letting you go now.
“He was dramatic and poetic,” I whispered as I handed him the phone. “I’ve memorized every line, and sometimes I just scramble them all up in hopes that it will mean something different.”
He did what he always did when he was avoiding words: he hummed to give us both a moment to digest what was happening.
I showed him my darkest secret, trusted him with a part of me I didn’t want anybody to see. He had the power now. I’d given it all to him.
“Will you delete it?” I asked quietly as he continued to stare at the phone.
“Am I a dangerous love or a safe one, Izzy?” he asked without answering me.
“I—” His dark gaze held mine, expecting me to know the answer. He wanted to know where we were going, as if we had anywhere to go at all. I knew my heart was lost to him, but I still tried to ignore it. “Aren’t we just having fun, Cade? You let Rodney in here because—”
“I let Rodney in here for your enjoyment. Not mine.” He immediately cut me off. “Don’t confuse my willingness to make you happy with how serious I am about you. I would’ve never have done that before.”
“We’re serious now?” He’d lost his mind. “What do you mean you wouldn’t have done that before?”
“Because I don’t share . . . except for you. For some reason, I’m inclined to make you feel good, even if it fucks with my head. I loved seeing you look alive while I watched, but don’t think for a second I’d let it happen again. You and I are done with others from this point on.”
“You don’t control that. If I want to go grab Rodney for a quickie—”
“It’ll be the last quickie he has before he dies a slow, excruciating death.” The threat rumbled out of him, so menacing I believed him.
“What are we doing?” I whispered, I asked, my heart beating so fast I swear my blood couldn’t keep up. “You’re talking like this is serious.”
“Is it not?” he asked, making me suddenly feel like I was the crazy one.
“What the hell would I tell our team out there?”
“The truth?” He shrugged.
“Didn’t you just hear me? I slept with an older man when I was sixteen, Cade.” I winced as I said it out loud. “The first time you met me, you called me an addict. Now I’m sleeping with my freaking boss. That doesn’t look real great for you.”
“I’m not too worried about my reputation.” He chuckled and leaned back against the wall to take me in. “What are you really scared of, Izzy?”
Did he not realize I could fall for him so fast and so hard that I’d never make it back to the surface? “Why do I have to be scared of anything? Why can’t it just be that this was fun and now we need to stop fucking around?”
“You ready to go back to bottling up everything you’re feeling?” He lifted his stupid dark brow.
“I’ve done it just fine over the years,” I blurted out, then I gasped at the words, slapping a hand over my mouth.
And there was that genuine smile of his when he pulled discomfort from someone, or when he cracked a fucking code or finished a stupid confidential project that he wouldn’t let me help him work on. “Exactly. And why do that another second when you’ve been fine letting it all go here?”
“Am I some sort of experiment to you?” I yelled. “I can’t gamble with this, with us, with any of it. I lost my first love because I was being reckless with my emotions and my behavior.”
“You lost him because he OD’d. He chose his own fate.”
“I could have stopped it,” I whispered.
“You can’t think like that. It’s like saying I could have stopped all the lives lost because my father. I could have stopped him.”
“But you did.” I pointed out.
“I could have done it sooner.”
“Do you really think like that?” I wondered if he took blame like so many children took on their parents’ sins.
“No.” He shook his head. “We can’t change someone’s path once their mind is made up. You can’t go back and rewrite his story or think of the what-ifs. It’s why you shouldn’t try to scramble that letter into something it’s not. You accept what people have done and respond to it in the way that’s best for you.”
“Is that what you did with your father?” I asked quietly, trying to understand him maybe like he was trying to understand me.
“Yes. We gave him what he deserved.” He stopped for a second to glance at his phone. “With Vincent, it seems you can only respond by writing him back, huh?”
“Like a letter?” I squinted at him.
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
I shook my head. “Look, I can’t. I can’t do any of this, okay? Let’s just forget we talked this over. It’s . . . I should have been able to stop him . . .” I took a deep breath.
“No, love.” His voice was soft, but firm. “You can’t blame yourself for a decision he made, Izzy.” He tried to pull me into his arms but I didn’t let him. He was saying what I’d probably needed to hear for a very long time but hadn’t gotten to.
Yet, I wanted to hide from him. I wanted to disappear. I wanted a damn hit or pick me up of a drug I couldn’t go back to.
That was the moment.
That feeling. It could consume me.
I knew I had to step away. I was lost in the depths of my own ocean of sorrow and embarrassment with another wave about to drown me. And it could have been the opposite; I could have been flying in a cloud of my own happiness, crazy in love and not seeing that the sun was about to blind me. I got too close to it all, and then I wanted to indulge in what could ruin me.
It was a sign. A stark reminder. “We shouldn’t be talking about this.”
“Why?” He frowned and then searched my face.
“Why? Because I haven’t told anyone this. You shouldn’t know this, Cade! Why would you even want to?” I poked him to shove him back, but he didn’t move an inch.
“Because I want to know everything about you. I’m trying to figure you out, to understand you.”
“I don’t want you to,” I exclaimed and combed my hands through my messy hair. God, I should have had it up in a ponytail. I shouldn’t have been prancing around in my wrinkled mess of clothes, head full of waves and face free of makeup. I’d unraveled and let myself go free when I shouldn’t have been. “I’m not a fucking algorithm to decode. I’m a screw up. That’s it.”