Total pages in book: 122
Estimated words: 115997 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 580(@200wpm)___ 464(@250wpm)___ 387(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 115997 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 580(@200wpm)___ 464(@250wpm)___ 387(@300wpm)
“No. I would love to go to Fiji with you.” Damn it, I could still taste her skin, and I was pretty sure that for the rest of my life, I’d be instantly hard the second I smelled her perfume.
“Okay, then what’s wrong?”
I looked into those big, brown eyes and debated lying, preserving the tiny breath of happiness that existed in this moment, but I just couldn’t. “I can’t go until 2017.”
She clutched the sides of her shirt and tied it, covering her incredible body. “Because you don’t have time? Do you need to go home instead? Because I get it if you need to see your mom.”
“No.” I shook my head. “She actually flew out when I got home a couple days ago.” Besides, Mom knew that as much as I loved her, I wasn’t ever going back there while he could still breathe. “We can’t do this because as much as I would love for now to be the right time for us, it isn’t.”
“It isn’t?” She drew her knees to her chest, and my stomach twisted.
“It can’t be. I’m on orders to a new post. Three months from now, I’ll be stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. It’s in Washington State.”
“That’s not the Washington I was hoping for.” Her shoulders slumped, and she tucked her long blonde hair behind her ears.
“Yeah.” I swallowed. “I wasn’t going to tell you on your birthday, not that . . .” Fuck. What was I trying to say? “Not that it should bother you—”
“Of course it bothers me that you’re being sent across the damned country.” She stood, wrapping her arms around her waist. “And I know that I don’t have a right to expect anything—you were really clear in Savannah that we’re not together—but I was hoping . . .” Her eyes closed, and she blew out a long, frustrated sigh. “I don’t know what I was hoping.”
“I do.” I moved toward her and cradled her face with my hands. “I was hoping I’d be a hell of a lot closer to you than twenty-eight hundred miles. I’d hoped that we could actually be more than a possibility.”
She lifted her hand to my chest. “Me too.”
There it was. Everything that needed to be said and everything we couldn’t.
“How long will you be there?” she asked.
“Probably three years,” I said as softly as possible.
Her breath caught, and the war of emotions that waged in her eyes was enough to crumple my chest. “Three years.”
“And that’s not all.” Shit. I’d avoided this since I’d walked through that door, and yet here I was, walking right into it. “The unit I’m headed to is already on the patch chart for rotation in a few months. Another deployment.” I could barely get the words out when it looked like each one sliced her to the quick.
“You’re . . .” Her lower lip trembled. “You’re going back?”
I ran my thumb across her lips and tried to ignore the crushing feeling in the center of my chest. “I’m always going back, Isabeau. They’re just shorter, more frequent deployments, as long as we don’t get extended. You’re in law school. You have more important things to focus on than someone who can barely get within three thousand miles of you on a regular basis.”
“And we agreed not to start something long distance.” A sad smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “We’ve already covered that topic once.”
“Right. I won’t do that to you. Even when I’ll be in the States, I’ll probably be at some school or another for professional development. All we’d ever have are weekends.” Weekends I would live for, but I wouldn’t accept the same for her.
“Maybe I could do weekends.” Her hand fisted in my shirt.
“Until you couldn’t. Until we couldn’t. Until it got to be something that broke us both. The last nine months felt like an eternity. I missed you every single second of every single day, Izzy, and we weren’t even in a relationship. Imagine what three years would feel like.” I leaned down, putting my forehead against hers. “We’d kill the possibility of us before we even had a shot at succeeding. I don’t want to waste our shot by taking it before we’re ready.”
“So why even come here?” she asked quietly, her eyes searching mine.
“Because I couldn’t stay away.” The truth of it was simple, and yet it complicated everything.
“And is this what you want for us?” One of her hands slid up to hold the back of my neck. “To be what? Pen pals? Friends? You want me to date other guys while you date other girls?”
My jaw ticked. “Of course that’s not what I want,” I somehow managed to say. She’d told me all about the guys she’d dated while I was gone. All law students. All here. All infinitely more capable of making her happy. “But that’s where we are. I want you to live, Izzy. I want you to go to class and get excited for your Friday nights. I want you to smile and laugh and not spend your months locked away in your room, waiting for me. It would kill me to watch you waste your life like that. I want us to get the shot we deserve, which means we both have to agree the timing is right, and it’s just . . . not. Not yet.”