31

31
BRANDON
For a moment, I just watch her go. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe she’s walking away from me again.
And then I shake my head.
No. Not this time.
I hurry after her and grab her arm. Alicia turns, confused, and stares at me. “What?”
“Where do you think you’re going?” “I told you. I need to get home.”
“And what about what you said in the river?” “What did I say?”
“That we would talk afterward. Sex first, then talking.” She shakes her head. “I didn’t say that.”
“Oh, yes, you did.” I’m not letting her off the hook that easily. “You said it was too hard to concentrate while we were fooling around, and that we could have sex or a conversation, but not both. And we agreed that the conversation would come afterward.”
“You wanted sex. Don’t act like you only did it to get me talking.”
“No, of course I didn’t only do it for that reason, but I want to talk too. It’s time we had this out.”
“What’s there to talk about?”
“How about the fact that I can’t figure out what’s going on with you? You’ve been a complete mystery to me ever since you came back to Greystone territory. We keep ending up together, but nothing ever comes of it.”
“You’re a good fuck.”
“No. It’s not just that,” I say. “You asked me earlier why it was different with you than it is with other women, and I told you I didn’t know, but that’s not the truth. The truth is that I care ten times as much about you as I ever have about anyone else.”
Alicia shakes her head. “You can’t,” she says. “You can’t care about me like that.”
“Why can’t I?” “I rejected you.”
“I know you did, Alicia, but it doesn’t matter to me. That hasn’t mattered to me for a long time. You rejected me when we were both young. Can you honestly tell me you feel the same way right now? That you want to walk away from me again?”
“Yes,” she whispers. But she’s looking away from me, and I don’t trust her answer.
“I don’t believe you,” I say. “I know there’s a part of you that wants to stay. I know there’s a part of you that wants to figure out what this thing between us might be. There’s potential for so much here. You can’t just walk away from it without feeling some kind of regret.”
“I have a child,” she says.
“You don’t think I could love your daughter?”
She shakes her head. “That’s not it,” she says. “I saw-I saw how you were with Emmy, Brandon. I know you could be a good-presence in her life.”
“Then what’s the problem? Why won’t you let me try?” To my shock, her eyes suddenly fill with tears. “Alicia?” I didn’t want to make her cry.
She shakes her head. “I can’t,” she says. “Even if I wanted to-even if I wanted you-there’s no way to make it work.”
“How can that be? There must be a way.” It sounds to me like she’s saying she does want me, even though she’s speaking in hypotheticals.
“You live in the pack,” she says. “You belong in the pack. Anyone can see that this is where you want to be.”
“And you don’t.”
“I can’t raise my daughter here. No matter what there is between you and me-”
“So you agree there’s something?” “Don’t make me say it,” she says. I hesitate and look at her.
She’s holding back tears. A few have slipped free, but she’s trying not to let me see how close she is to breaking down. She doesn’t want me to know.
She doesn’t want me to know she loves me.
The energy between us is so powerful right now, I feel like I’m looking right into her heart. There’s no way she’s not feeling what I’m feeling. There’s no way she wants to leave me.
But she doesn’t want to tell me that she wants to stay. She doesn’t want me
to make her tell me.
I can’t make her do anything. I watch her quietly instead.
“I can’t raise Emmy here,” she says. “Not with Lonnie coming into power. It’s not a fit place for her to grow up. I can’t be around a pack that doesn’t respect me, especially not once my brother is in charge. Once he’s alpha, Deidre won’t have to go to the Boneyard to get high. She’ll be around here full time. And now that she’s unmarried and with her son in charge, she’ll have nothing to do but make me miserable and torment my daughter.”
I close my eyes. It’s really not about me. She doesn’t want to be here, but it’s not because she doesn’t want me.
She does want me.
For the first time, I really feel in my gut that Alicia’s rejection of me was about something else entirely. I just happened to be the man standing opposite her when she decided to run away from this place. But if it hadn’t been me, the outcome would have been the same. She would have run away from anyone.
She wasn’t rejecting me. At least, that’s not the biggest thing she was doing. I wasn’t enough to make her want to stay, but the bottom line is that she was rejecting the pack as a whole.
She was rejecting this life. I was only a part of that.
I’m so in love with her that I’m ready to do whatever it takes to make things work between us this time.