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“I know,” he said, tone softening. “But it’ll hurt a hell of a lot more if I don’t leave. Tara is my little girl, and I know in my heart she would forgive me one day, but I don’t think she’d ever look at you the same. And that’s not something I can live with.”

“Reed…”

“Halley, please, try to see the bigger picture here. You need to see this for what it is and not for what you desperately want it to be.” Stepping closer and sounding broken, he finished with, “I told you I would always fight for you, and I meant that. This is how I’m doing it.”

I choked out another sob and lowered my hands from my eyes, gazing up at him with all the bare-boned truth I could muster. “I love you,” I confessed painfully. “You can’t pull me from rock bottom and then send me right back.”

My heart was a splattered mess between us, the love inside of it spitting and snarling for one last beat. He could scoop it up in his palms, mold it into something beautiful, something better, and return it to the bleeding cavern inside my chest.

Or he could stomp it out.

Snuff the flickering of life out of it with just one look, one word, one step in the opposite direction.

Reed’s eyes slowly closed as he drew in a long breath, like he was debating what to do with the most precious piece of me. “Halley, this is infatuation. This is the thrill of sneaking around with an off-limits man who is twice your age.”

Goodbye, Heart.

His words chewed through me, acid corroding flesh. A dagger with dull blades sawing through my bones. I wrapped both arms around my stomach as if that could keep my pain tucked inside. “How dare you say that to me,” I gritted out, teeth grinding against metal.

“It’s the truth.”

“That’s your truth. It’s not mine.”

“It’s the only truth.”

“No.” I glared those dull daggers right back at him. “How dare you rearrange my feelings into something that makes you feel better about walking away. How dare you talk to me like I’m a child—like I’m a lost, pathetic little girl who doesn’t have the mental capacity to know what she wants. How dare you make me feel these things and then twist them into something dirty. You made me finally feel something, Reed, something other than this godforsaken pit of worthlessness and loneliness, and now you’re?—”

Reed snatched me by the biceps and spun me around, walking me backward until I was pushed up against the cushioned wall and his face was centimeters from mine. Trailing his hands up my arms, he gently cupped my cheeks, tenderizing the hard steel I was molding around us. “I feel those things, too,” he said, chest heaving, voice hitching. “I feel it, Comet. I do. But it’s not what you think.” His forehead fell to mine as he sucked in a fraught breath. “It’s a goddamn death sentence.”

Anger battled it out with treacherous pain. I knew he was right, but it was too easy to be hateful and bitter when my heart had become nothing more than rubble clogging my ribcage.

Mascara-laced tears streaked down my cheeks as I shoved him away from me. “Fine. Go.”

He palmed his hair back, slick with sweat from exertion and heartache. “Don’t make this harder.”

“Don’t tell me how I’m supposed to respond to the things you’re setting in motion.”

“I never wanted it to go this far. I never wanted to hurt you.”

“Well, you failed.” My shield went up, my weapon drawn. I was mad. So irrevocably mad. “You just had to be so perfect. My white knight. My rescuer. You had to be everything I’ve dreamed about, every wish I’ve made on falling stars and birthday candles and pennies in mall fountains, and you had to make me fall in love with you.” Words spilled out of me, assaulting him like an ambush. “How could I not? It was so damn easy. You made it easy.”

His brow was wrinkled, features taut and brimming with tension. “Nothing about this is easy.”

“Falling for you has been the easiest thing I’ve ever done,” I confessed through the anguish. “Everything else? Painful. Torturous. Difficult beyond belief. But loving you…” The anger died out, flatlining to a dead pulse. “Effortless.”

Tears rimmed his eyes, his emerald irises glowing with heartbreak as he drank in my pain and let it funnel through him. Stepping forward, he tried to reach for me again, but I dodged him. There was no comfort here.

No more soft-landings.

“Don’t,” I said, moving backward. “I can’t.”

“Halley—”

“Just go. Leave. Pretend none of this ever happened and toss me away, just like my parents did, just like?—”

“Whitney knows.”

My words clipped off, nosediving off a craggy bluff.