But what if we don’t even get the chance of giving this a shot? I wanted to scream.

“I need you to trust in us, in me. Can you do that?”

“I trust you, Aaron.” I shook my head and stepped out of his reach. “But this is just … too complicated. I don’t think I can do it. Go through it again.” My heart would never recover if this didn’t work. If Aaron fled the ship like Daniel had.

More hurt poured into the blue of his eyes. “You don’t then,” he whispered, his voice broken. “If you mean that, then you don’t trust me.”

Silence weighed down on us. Aaron’s shoulders eventually falling.

“I love you, Lina.”

A crack sliced its way across my poor, beaten heart at how wrong those four words sounded. How void of happiness and full of sorrow they were when they shouldn’t have been.

“How is it possible that it feels like you are breaking my heart, and I haven’t even had you yet?”

My soul shattered. I broke in a hundred million pieces.

“I can’t make you trust me like I need you to. With your whole fucking heart.” He searched my face, those blue eyes missing their usual light. Reflecting only hurt. “I can’t make you run into my arms instead of in the opposite direction. I just … can’t make you love me enough to give us a chance.”

A hole opened in my chest, my knees almost giving out at the earth beneath my feet tilting the wrong way. Unbalanced.

We stared into each other’s eyes for a long time, our hearts in each other’s fists for all the wrong reasons. It all felt unreal. Like a cruel nightmare I’d wake up from any minute now.

But it never happened. At some point, I thought I heard his phone ringing, and I watched him ignore it until it rang again. And again. Then, I thought he pulled it out of his pocket and peered down at the screen. But I wasn’t sure.

My head kept chanting, Trust him, trust him, trust him, making it hard for me to make sense of anything else but that.

I was trapped by my own mind. Sucked in a vacuum where I didn’t grasp time or space. Although I did remember one thing. And that was Aaron’s back moving away from me. His legs walking him down the empty hallway and him not looking back.

Not even once.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Rosie came home with me that night.

We curled under a blanket on my bed and rewatched Moulin Rouge! on my laptop. How tragic—to find love and see it slip through your fingers before your eyes. I always wondered what Ewan McGregor would have done had he known since the moment he met the love of his life that their story wouldn’t last more than one hundred thirty minutes. Would he still take her hand in his and jump? Would he still hold on to every moment left even if only a few? Would he still lie down by her side, knowing that when she was gone, that space would never be filled again?

Rosie didn’t even think before giving me her answer. “Yes,” she whispered. “When you find that kind of love, time stops mattering. Come what may, Lina, he would love her regardless of how long they had.”

Then, we both bawled our eyes out. Rosie because she could never hold it in when “Come What May” kicked in, and me … well, mostly because I had welcomed the excuse.

So, I cried. I let those tears fall as I held my phone in my hand. Waiting for a call, a message, a sign that I knew I didn’t deserve. But that was what dumb chickenshits like me did. They cowered, hid under a blanket, and cried to “El Tango de Roxanne.”

Ugh. I didn’t like myself one single bit.

But come what fucking may, I’d still have to live with myself for the rest of my life. Find solace in the little time I had shared with Aaron. Past tense. Because when he had asked me to run into his arms instead of in the opposite direction, I hadn’t. When he had asked me to trust him—in us—wholly, I hadn’t been capable of doing it, even when I thought I had. And that had pushed him to walk away.

I pushed him away. I was the only one responsible for that.

Fuck. I wanted him here. With me, mending the broken pieces of this mess together. I wanted him to tell me that he believed we could still be fixed. Glued back together and good as new.

But that was so selfish and so very naive of me. Stupidly so. Sometimes, as much as we wanted something, we weren’t meant to have it. To keep it. Not when it complicated everything else. And this thing—love because that was exactly what it was—between us did. It complicated both our lives, the promises of both careers.

We were tripping each other, making each other fall, just how Daniel had said all that time ago.

We’d have grown to resent each other. Because that was what the poison born of malicious mouths did. It infected everything. And I knew just how much.

So, yeah, after Moulin Rouge–crying-gate, the following day obviously sucked. It was probably one of the worst, most miserable days I remembered, and I knew a fair bit about those. I dragged my feet the whole day, somehow managing to get through the eight to midnight Open Day for a bunch of faceless suits. Names and faces bounced right off me, and I presented topic after topic as if every word were being ripped out of me. If Jeff had been around to witness that lame attempt at being welcoming, accommodating, and approachable, he’d have fired me on the spot.

And I wouldn’t have found it in me to care.

That was how ironic life could be sometimes.

When I entered the building on day two without Aaron—which I realized was my new way to count down time—I waited for the whispers of my colleagues to reach my ears and their fingers to be pointed at me for no reason other than Gerald’s public accusations. By the time the clock hit five p.m.—after I spent the day wishing I’d get a glimpse of Aaron and dreading it, all at the same time—nothing had happened. None of my colleagues had batted an eyelash at me. No disgusting rumors, no nasty accusations, nothing. Not a flash of Aaron either.

On day three without him, an odd kind of restlessness burrowed itself in me. I missed Aaron. I missed the possibility of what had been growing between us, and that started overweighing everything else. It didn’t seem so important that the incident with Gerald had not led anyone to treat me any differently. I couldn’t find it in me to be relieved. What did it matter when there was a hole in my chest?

I missed Aaron’s face, the ocean blue in his eyes, his stubborn frown, the way his lips puckered when he was lost in thought, the wide line of his shoulders, how he effortlessly stood tall and big as life wherever he went, and his smile—that smile that was just for me. So much that I set camp in my office, left the door open, and waited for him to walk down the hallway at some point in the day. Or to hear his voice even if in the distance. That would have been enough to appease that need burning inside of me. But none of that happened.

On day four, I finally gave up and knocked on his office door, going unanswered. And when I asked Rosie if she had seen him around at all, she hugged me and said she hadn’t. Neither had Héctor or the few other people I had somehow found an excuse to ask.

That was exactly why I was pacing from one corner of the hallway to the opposite one as I waited to be called into Sharon’s office. Just like I had been doing at home last night. Or that morning in my office. Because he had disappeared. And I hated not knowing why, not seeing him, not having him around, not … having an excuse to call and ask him because I had pushed him away and the last thing he probably wanted to do was talk to me.

“Lina, darling,” Sharon called as her head peeked out of her office, jerking me back into the present. “Please come in and take a seat.”

Following her inside, I let myself fall into one of the chairs. I watched the blonde lady sit down and lean over her desk with a secretive smile.