I need her to wake up, and yet it terrifies me. What if she turns me away?

I take her hand in mine and lay my head on the bed next to her shoulder, listening to her breathing, and let sleep come.

***

The phone is ringing.

Charly shifts on the bed, reaching for it, as I sit up and scowl at the stiffness in my body. God, everything hurts. I’m pretty sure I’ll never be able to turn my head to the left again.

“Hello?” she says and shoves her hand through her hair. She hasn’t looked back at me yet. “No, I’m fine.” She yawns. “I’m not hung over, which is good, I guess. Yeah.”

Now she turns to stretch and sees me, and immediately scowls.

“Who the fuck let Simon in my house? You let him bring me home?”

“I’m sitting right here,” I remind her with a smile.

“Of course I slept all night. I was drunk, and I haven’t slept much in weeks. But you and I are going to talk about this later.” She hangs up and glares at me. “Why are you here?”

“Charly—”

“Wait.” She climbs out of the bed. “I’m not doing this in my bedroom. You go downstairs and I’ll be there in a minute.”

I’m not going to argue. The bedroom isn’t the place for this. I make my way gingerly down the stairs, rubbing my neck and wishing for coffee with everything in my being.

But I sit on the couch, my elbows resting on my knees, and wait.

After what feels like an hour, she comes downstairs. She’s taken a shower, and is in clean clothes. Her face is washed clean.

“You’re so beautiful, you take my breath away.”

“Right.” She nods once and sits on a chair opposite me. “I’m not interested in hearing that you think I’m beautiful. I’d like for you to tell me why you’re here.”

Because I’ve missed you so much it feels like my heart has been ripped from my body.

“First, I’d like to apologize, Charlotte. I’m truly sorry for the way I left things last month. You didn’t deserve that.”

“No,” she says. Her voice is calm, her face emotionless. I wish she’d throw something at me. “I didn’t deserve it.”

“I guess I didn’t realize how many unresolved issues I had to resolve. I almost equate it to a bit of post-traumatic stress.” I shrug and shake my head. “I walked into your shop that day and saw you with the man in your storeroom.”

She cocks a brow. “And rather than interrupt, or ask me about it later, you jumped to conclusions. Again.”

“I did.” I link my fingers and lower my head. “I’m a fucking idiot.”

“I won’t argue there,” she says. “Okay, you’ve apologized. There’s the door.”

She stands to leave the room, and I jump up, rushing after her.

No.

“Charly—”

“What?” she yells and turns back me, her eyes blazing now. This is what I need. Emotion. “What do you want from me?”

“I just want you.”

“Well, you had me, and you fucked it up, Simon. I was ready to tell you all about Ryan that evening. I didn’t have any fucking secrets from you.”

“You’re magnificent when you’re angry,” I murmur.

“You’d be angry too if the person you’d fallen in love with left you without an explanation. If the person you love threw all of your insecurities in your face on his way out the fucking door.”

I reach for her, but she ducks out of my way.

She loves me.

“You’d be exhausted too if you couldn’t sleep in your own bed because of the memories there, and instead you crash on your brother’s lumpy couch every night.”

“Baby—”

“I had just learned to trust you, to trust what I was feeling for you, Simon. I opened myself up to you.”

“I know.”

“And now you think that you can show up here, get a black eye, apologize, and everything would be okay? You can’t just fix this with that smile of yours.”

“I know that too.” I sigh, wanting to pull her into my arms so badly that it hurts. She stomps over to the door and pulls it open, and it’s exactly like the day I left.

“I want you to leave.”

“No.” I stay where I am, staring at the woman I love. “Not until you hear me out. And then, if you want to throw me out, I’ll go and not come back. But I came a long way to see you and to say a few things.”

She closes the door, not slamming it, which gives me a bit of hope, then turns around and crosses her arms over her chest, waiting.

“You have five minutes. I have to work today.”

God, she’s tough.

“First, you should know that I am completely and irreversibly in love with you.”

She blinks, but her expression doesn’t change, and the pit in my stomach grows.

“Amy fucked me up. I didn’t know just how much until I’d fallen in love with you and the baggage kept rearing its ugly head. I know that leaving, especially the way I did, was absolutely wrong, but to be honest, Charly, I’m glad it happened that way. I needed to go home and set some things right before I could make them right with you.”

I swallow and pace the room.

“I don’t mean that I had to make anything right with Amy, or my parents. I needed to make it right with me. I was convinced that I’d never be able to shake the blinding jealousy I had every time another man looked at you.” I turn to her now in time to see her frown. But she doesn’t interrupt. “I’d never been jealous in my life. I didn’t like it. And when I saw you with Ryan, my first instinct was to run because I convinced myself that I would never live through another repeat of what happened with Amy.”