Page 60 of Ice Cold Hearts
“Ian.”
He stops and meets my eyes questioningly. “Yes?”
“I—” Immediately, I lose my nerve. “I really appreciate you and everything you’ve done for me. You know that, right?”
Ian’s eyes soften like he heard what I’d left unsaid anyway. “I appreciate you too, Emily, very much.”
Like a coward, I turn tail and run to the shower.
As I scrub the smell of sex off my body, my eyes land on the marks Ian left on my breast and hip. They’re nearly perfectly diagonal from each other, and I wonder if he’s done that on purpose. Maybe it’s a message.
There you go again, looking for mountains inside mole hills. Sometimes, things are just coincidences.
I shake my head to clear out the nonsense.
What pops into my head next has me wishing I’d spent more time shoring up my hickey conspiracy theories.
This hot water is supposed to loosen the knots in my muscles, but the wave of anxiety that crashes over me has me clenched tighter than the lid of an unopened peanut butter jar.
If I had told Ian I loved him just now, he’ll see it as a total betrayal once they find out Oliver is Audrey’s father. He’s going to think I was using him to get close to Oliver, and it’s going to break his heart.
What if he never wants to see me again after he finds out? Could I really handle that after I tell him how I feel about him?
How do I even begin to broach the subject? Do I just drop it on them like a bomb? Should I make a presentation like I did in college? Is this a separate discussion? Obviously, I tell Oliver first, but who do I tell next? Will the person I tell last be upset at being told last? Do I just blurt it out when we’re all together? Or do I just wait and hope no one ever finds out?
My scrubbing gets more aggressive as I wrestle with myself over this.
You just committed to being their girlfriend. Things are officially serious. You have to tell them.
I groan and crank up the hot water.
Alexei’s voice drifts through my mind. “Those house meetings we have here are for more than event planning or replenishing the snack hoard.”
Okay, I’ll call a house meeting and tell them together.
That’s one problem solved, at least.
What would I even say? Hey, you know how Oliver and I fucked five years ago and I stole his shirt? Well, that’s not the only thing I left with that belonged to him. Surprise!
No, definitely not that.
I rest my head against the cool tiles of the shower and take several deep breaths.
This is a big deal. It might end our relationship.
Might isn’t a done deal. It could go either way when you tell them, but keeping something like this secret and then having them find out will definitely end the relationship.
Secrets, no matter for what reason you’re keeping them, are not a good foundation for a healthy relationship. When things were more casual, I had some wiggle room, but now that they’re officially my boyfriends, there is no excuse for my not telling them now.
You don’t have to blurt it out over breakfast, but the longer you hide this from them, the harder it will be to repair the relationship.
What Ian told me last night about the press makes my window much smaller for telling them myself instead of their finding out from someone else. A month would be too risky. Telling them in a day or two won’t be enough time.
Two weeks, then.
It will be highly unlikely for the press to dig that up in two weeks, especially since he’s not listed on her birth certificate, but it also gives me enough time to figure out what to say.
Two weeks or less. That might be all the time I have before my heart gets shattered beyond repair.