But he wanted to. For her.

He wanted to do more, to be more. To be better.

For her.

He wished that he could erase his past. His loss. His pain. Because it had broken him.

And he never wished that. He never wished it because there was no point. Just like there was no point in tears. No point in regret.

But she had come to him untouched, and not without pain, and he had come to her broken beyond repair.

He wished he could be different.

And he gave himself up to that. To the need to be more than he ever had been for her.

Because who had been there for her?

Here she was, worrying about what she could give her mother... Who worried about what they could give to her?

She thought she wasn’t enough.

And he had been part of that.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, gripping her hips and guiding her up and down on his cock. “The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. You deserve everything. You deserve the world.”

Hands braced on his chest, he could see her eyes begin to glitter. See tears welling there, and it just made him want to give her even more.

“You deserve everything you’ve got. You deserve all the money from that song. You are absolutely perfect. In every way.”

She closed her eyes, and began to shake, and he could feel the tenuous grip he had on his control beginning to slip. “You’re a star,” he said. “And you’re more than enough.”

And then she dissolved, and he went right along with it, his climax like a vicious beast, grabbing him around the throat and shaking him hard.

“I love you,” she said. “I love you.”

And just like that, very deep inside of her, with her words echoing inside of him, it was like a sledgehammer had been taken to the walls all around his soul. The gates that held back his emotions demolished with three simple words.

And he felt like he had been dragged out into the middle of an open field, naked. Exposed and vulnerable to every attack.

It was as if blinders he had put up intentionally had dissolved. As if everything that he had put up between them had vanished.

Everything.

I love you.

And it was too much. Too much. It reminded him of the moment when he had hit Boone. Because it was like something sharp and vicious was cutting open his insides. Like his heart was going to explode. It wasn’t that he felt nothing. It was that he felt everything, and he had no idea how to combat that. No idea what to do about it. There was nothing, he realized. Because the problem was knowing it was the truth. Knowing that what he had been protecting himself all along from was the intensity of it.

The desperation of it.

And he couldn’t un-know it now.

He felt terrified. Utterly terrified. Because she loved him, and he felt more than any one person should. Because she loved him, and he felt like he might break apart. Because she loved him, and it truly felt like hell. Because she loved him, and he was faced with the realization that she was so fragile. So beautiful. And life had come along and taken that from him. It had already taken so much.

The more you cared, the more you could lose.

And he realized...

That was all this was. It was all it had ever been. All he had ever been truly afraid of. It was losing someone he loved again. It was caring so much he could be in that position where he felt too much. Where he wanted too much.

He had punched Boone, because Boone had felt all of the things that lived inside of him. All of the things he wanted to turn away from. All of the things he wanted to deny.

But he was still holding her, and he was still in her, and he couldn’t help himself. “I love you too.”

He lay back on the floor, feeling like he had just lost a war.

One he had been fighting for the better part of his life. One he hadn’t even realized he’d been on the slow path to losing from the minute he had first seen her.

Every bit of his resolve. Every bit of everything, it was broken. Demolished. And so was he.

He knew why he had been fighting it all this time. Knew why he had been fighting her.

He damn well did.

Because this was terrifying. He was happy to throw himself on the back of an angry bull; he was happy to work until his body ached and his hands bled.

It was the feeling. That was what he didn’t want to do. Not what he couldn’t do. It was the thing that scared him. Believing so much in something, hoping so much. Loving someone so much, and losing them anyway. Losing everything anyway.

“You love me?”

He sat up, staring straight at the Christmas tree that they had just decorated together.

Staring straight at the Christmas that could be his if...

“Shit,” he said.

“What?”

“I...”

He was suddenly choked. By the memories. The memories of that night that they had broken up. The memory of the night that he had lost her.

That he had let her walk away.

She had thought that she might be pregnant with his baby and he’d said he didn’t want it. Of course he wanted it. He wanted everything with her. He wanted a whole life. A baby and everything, but facing down that possibility, that little bit of hope... It had been too much for him. He hadn’t been able to claim it. He hadn’t been able to admit it.

And now... He felt swamped with it. With the loss of it. The loss of that potential future. The baby, her.

All the things that he hadn’t been able to say then. And he wanted to say them now.