“—in the cafeteria,” he said, his voice serious and losing patience. “I’m not leavin’ till you come talk to me.”
“Don’t you understand?” she bit out in a furious rush, her eyes flashing, regret and anger rushing to the fore of her confused emotions. “My father almost died! Might still die! I can’t talk to you. Go home, Erik. Go back to Raleigh. Go back to Duke. Leave me alone!”
Her words knocked him off-balance. She saw it. She felt it. And it hurt like a sharp knife to a soft place.
“Leave you . . .?”
“Alone. I mean it,” she said, keeping her face stony even as goddamn tears trailed down her cheeks, betraying her. “Please leave.”
“Darlin’, I don’t have to go until Thursday. I can be here with you every—”
“No, you can’t! You’re not listening to me!” she cried. “I’m not your darlin’. I’m not your anything. We were just a . . . a fling. A fantasy. I’m an islander; you’re a dingbatter. It’s over.”
He flinched, his face twisting as her words sank in.
Laire looked away, concealing a whimper and ignoring the cracking and breaking of her heart. It had already been torn in half between her father and her lover. Now those halves were splintering into tiny pieces, painful shards, in this hospital room where her father lay unconscious and her lover begged for something she couldn’t give him: more time. They’d run out of time in spectacular fashion, and everything that had existed between them didn’t feel real—felt like a fantasy, like a sweet dream that had ended in a gruesome nightmare.
“Please go,” she begged him.
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand. The summer’s over. We’re over.”
He’d been leaning down toward her, but he straightened up, still looking down at her, his eyes fraught and confused as they searched hers. His voice low, but fierce, his face as shattered as her heart, he asked, “Why . . . why’re you doin’ this? I’m sorry about your father . . . but we love each other.”
She sucked in a painful breath, the truth of his words biting at her. He did love her, and she did love him, but Laire Maiden Cornish had gotten a bleak and sudden dose of reality when her father went into cardiac arrest because of her recklessness. She and Erik were an impossibility in the real world. There was no use pretending any differently.
“No,” she said, hating herself, hating him, hating her father, lying so still and silent between them, hating her sisters and the Pamlico House and the whole fucking world. “It wasn’t real, Erik. It wasn’t real.”
He gasped, blinking at her in disbelief as his face blanched to white. White. Like white-hot pain. She could see it. She could feel it, and it burned her inside like nothing she’d ever felt before.
“You can’t mean that, dar—”
“Laire? Everythin’ okay?” Over Erik’s shoulder, Kyrstin came into view, standing with her hands on her hips just behind Erik. “I’m back. I woke up early.”
“Kyrs,” she murmured, clenching her jaw to try to stanch her tears.
“I’m Kyrstin,” she said to Erik. “You are . . .?”
“No one!” said Laire, springing up from the chair beside her father. She shifted her eyes from Kyrstin to Erik. “He’s no one. He’s just in the wrong room. You were leaving, weren’t you?”
Erik’s eyes shuddered as if he’d been sucker punched, and when they opened, they were glistening and heavy. He turned to Kyrstin. “Yeah. I’m . . . I’m leavin’.”
Kyrstin raised her eyebrows, taking a good look at him before shifting her stare to Laire, who stood with her fists clenched by her side. After a moment, she slid her gaze back to Erik. “Nurses’ station can help you find whoever you’re lookin’ for.”
Erik clenched his jaw, then swallowed, nodding at Kyrstin before looking at Laire.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and if those shards had any chance of repair, now they were blown to dusty smithereens with the deep sorrow, deep regret, she heard in his voice. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
He leaned forward to place the flowers on the table at the foot of her father’s bed, met her eyes one last time, then turned and left the room.
She watched him go, felt the burn in her lungs and in her eyes and everywhere he’d so lovingly touched. She’d never known pain like this. Not when her mother died. Not ever. And yet she blinked until her tears retreated. Then she lifted her chin and her gaze to her sister.
Laire and Kyrstin stood in silence, facing each other, neither of them saying anything.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Kyrstin pulled a chair to the opposite side of their father’s bed and sat down, taking their father’s right hand, and Laire, who’d made her choice, for better or worse, sat down across from her sister, and took his left.
Chapter 15
Three months later
Erik Rexford was drinking way too much.
His grades were shit.
He’d been benched from the Devils.
He’d been placed on both academic and social probation.