“I’m both.”
“Do you think I care what you call yourself?”
She flinched and he almost reached for her. “I don’t expect you to care, but I wanted to see you. I wanted to apologize,” she said.
Coming here, looking like this, she was trying to manipulate him again. And he was almost ready to let her. “You see me and that’s as far as you get. I don’t hook up with groupies anymore, and I don’t fall in love with liars.”
“I’m sorry. Grip, I’m sorry.”
He was tired, his bones too heavy to carry. When he thought he was over her. A good night ruined. “Go home, Mena,” or go find some other sucker to fuck over.
“I never meant to lie to you. I have no excuse. I was greedy and I was afraid and I didn’t trust you enough to be truthful, and that’s all on me.”
Greedy he could fathom, he’d been greedy too, but he’d done nothing to make her afraid, even agreed with Caroline Swire that Mena’s advice had been good, better than good. For the first time he had a plan that felt like it matched the life he wanted to live, a mission to use his money well for himself and for what he could do to help others.
“Afraid of what?” To say she was afraid of him was an insult.
“That you’d be different. That I’d fall for you again and you wouldn’t want the real me, the whole of me.”
It was nothing he’d done. He put his hand up. “I don’t want to hear it. You are not who I thought you were. I spent a week with a girl called Philly who was a shining genuine extraordinary person. She knew how to listen and how to laugh. She knew how to give. She wasn’t a fucking liar. I fell in love with her. I didn’t think she’d disappear. You can’t play dress-ups and be that person again. You can’t go back, not to fifteen years ago, not to two weeks ago.”
“I don’t want to go back. I never fell out of love with you, but I let you go because I needed to make something of my life. I am still the same underneath. I did this to try to prove it.” Mena dropped her gaze. “I can see now it was another terrible mistake.”
Was he supposed to buy that, the contrition? This stunt she’d pulled. The way she held herself stiffly as if she was brittle, the way she braved her discomfit. Fuck. Fuck. He wanted to buy it so badly. The fact she was Philly and she was Mena and when she looked up at him, gorgeous face full of anxiety, he wanted to pull her into his body and make the hurt and anger go away.
“All I’ve done is make mistakes with you,” she said. “I left you after we first met to keep a promise to myself. I lied to you for my career. I meant to tell you, I tried, but I was too busy falling for you all over again and I left it too long.”
He wanted to bang something over and over again. Play until his fingers ceased and his head was emptied of emotion. “You meant to tell me. When? When I wondered if we’d met before? When I told you I’d lost someone I loved because I wasn’t paying enough attention? When I asked you all those questions? When you knew I meant you? You were never going to tell me. You were lying the whole time.”
“I’m not lying now. I did this, came here, talked my way in to see you, to tell you how sorry I am, that I will never forgive myself for being less than you deserve, for losing you.”
“You never had me.” But if that was true, why this storm inside him?
“I can see by the way you played that I only had a part of you. I was right about something at least. You have changed. Just not the way I’d expected, but out there tonight on that piano—you’re the one who’s extraordinary.”
Walk away, walk away before the storm breaks. Walk away before she makes a fool of you all over again because she knows you, all the parts of you, she hears you through all the noise and she can use that as a weapon.
“Being Philly was a joke to you.” He’d fallen for a fake. Groupies were trophy collectors and she’d collected him twice.
“It was never a joke to me. But I couldn’t be Philly forever. My mistake was making my career my whole life, the thing I valued more than truth, than love, and that’s how I lost you.”
“Once a fucking liar.” He didn’t need to finish the sentence, he needed to finish the encounter before he said something to hurt her that he’d regret forever.
“I wasn’t lying when I said I’d fallen for you.”
That was such a deceit he should be able to smell it on her. He closed the distance between them, leaned into her, smelled only the same complicated perfume of her hair, the scent of her luscious skin. She took an audible breath, eyes wide, lips parted. Everything about her pulled at him. If he kissed her, would he taste her duplicity?
He bent his head, grazed his nose over her cheek and took her mouth, softening under his, tasting of nothing but memories, lingerie and piano lids, spas and moonlight, shared laughter and rumpled sheets.
She gasped when he released her and he would’ve kissed her again for revenge, for sadness, for forgiveness, but he had changed. This time he knew he was being manipulated, knew it would cost him dearly, and he walked away.
He didn’t get far before he
