I peered up at him through half-lidded irritation, the heat of his chest caging me in.
“Could you take a step back?” I snapped, pressing my open hand flat on his stomach in a clear warning, but it did not work. He didn’t move, just stared into me as if I owed him something.
“Who the hell crawls out of a bathroom window and ghosts their date in front of all their friends?” he asked, every bit of his ego pulsing around us in sharp pastel bursts.
“I was uncomfortable.” I shot him a look, twisting my arm from his grasp.
“So your first instinct was to James Bond yourself out of the bar window rather than, I don’t know, come tell me so we could leave?”
Of course it was.
I did not function logically.
When my nervous system told me to run, I ran. It was as easy as that.
“Yes,” was all I knew how to say.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” I rolled my neck until it popped. “Everything about last night was so goddamn suffocating. The lights. The music. The endless conversation about bikinis and Mexico.”
“Oh shit. Not bikinis. Anything but that,” he groaned, lifting his hands in mock surrender.
But it wasn’t the topic. It was the bodies that wore them. The people who saw their lives as something to be lived instead of survived! I did not know what to do with that. Any of it. Finn might have the luxury of normal cortisol levels, but we were not the same.
Mainewas not the same.
In Seattle, I was a competent woman who delivered babies by day and snuggled monsters at night. But here? It felt like someone was shining a light directly into my eyes, reminding me at every turn that I was not enough.
“I could have talked you through it,” he grumbled. “Or we could have done literally anything else. I just wanted…” his shoulders relaxed. “To spend time with you. I didn’t care how.”
Finn’s words were sweet, dripping in a language my body never learned. I knew I differed from the shiny baubles he was used to, but whatever he was searching for, a window, a way out, something to make him feel alive, he would not find it in me.
My window only led to one person.
“Look.” I reached for his arm, sliding my hand up the curl of his biceps. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
“Well, you did, Daphne,” he said with a tight smirk, turning away. “But more than that, you embarrassed yourself.”
Embarrassed myself.
A salty tang hit my tongue at the way he branded me. All for the sake of what… optics?
“Did I?” My grip tightened into a shove. “Because I did not feel humiliated when I left, Finn. I felt relieved. Still, though, you may wish to step back.” I flung a roll of gauze into the kit. “Wouldn’t want my shame rubbing off on you.”
“Too late,” he glared, knocking several items onto the floor.
I eyed his toddler outburst and bolted for the door, wanting nothing more than to get the hell out of this penalty box I had somehow wandered into. Sure, I’ll admit there had always been a small part of me that wondered if I could survive without Thayor Milo Gavros. I was happy to report that I could not.
And more importantly, I did not want to.
“That’s right, Daphne. Run. It is all you know how to do.”
Fuck this guy. He could shove his lobster-roll-eating, sports-bar-attending, golden-boy soul straight up his perfectly curated ass.
“You know, eventually you’re going to have to ask yourself if all those pretty little walls you throw at people are protecting you or preventing you from becoming the person you so desperately want to be.”
“Yeah?” I paused, scanning every clean line, every polished edge of his face. “Well, sooner or later,youwill have to admit to all these opinions how much you hate your fucking life. How you are just waiting for the right chance to strike a flame and watch it all burn to the ground! Being a midwife won’t redeem you for what happened with Xaden’s sister.”