I swallowed hard, unnerved. “You . . . you mean the night you were drunk off your ass, and I had to drive you home?”

Reece lifted his head and those eyes bored into mine. Neither of us spoke for a long moment, and I was thrust back eleven months, two weeks and three days ago. He’d been at the bar, and we’d been flirting with each other like we’d been doing every time we saw each other since he returned from overseas. But when he came back, it was like those years he’d been gone had washed away. Visions of marriage and making babies had danced in my head despite the fact I’d ordered myself not to read into the harmless flirting. But I’d been infatuated and I’d also been an idiot. That night, he’d asked me to drive him home, and I’d thought he was finally making a move—­a really weird way to make a move, but I hadn’t really thought the whole thing through. I’d been crushing on this guy forever and I had been greedy with his attention, so I did it. When we’d gotten to his place, I’d followed him inside and I . . . I had been the one to really make the move.

Gathering up all the courage I had in me, I had kissed him, right inside his apartment, the moment he’d closed the door. Things had escalated quickly. Clothes had come off, body parts were most definitely touching, and I . . .

“I’d give anything to remember that night,” Reece continued, looking me straight on, and that voice got richer. “Anything to remember what it felt like being inside of you.”

Several things happened to me all at once. Muscles low in my belly tightened at the same moment disappointment swelled like a tide, washing away the anger flushing my system. I closed my eyes as I bit down on my lip.

Reece believed that eleven months, two weeks, and three days ago, we’d had sex—­wild, animalistic against-­the-­wall sex, but he’d been too drunk to remember it. Too shitfaced to remember anything past the moment we’d gotten naked in the hallway.

I just hadn’t realized he’d been that far into his cups, which was stupid, because I bartended and knew when ­people were plastered and needed to be cut off. Hell, he’d asked me to drive him home, for crying out loud, but I had been so . . . so caught up in him. So damn hopeful and so beyond crushing, because it was more than that. I had fallen in love with him when I was fifteen and that hadn’t changed in all those years.

I’d stayed the night with him, and when he’d woken up the next morning, hungover and so damn apologetic, regretful and seconds from chewing his arm off to get away from me, my heart had cracked. And in the immediate weeks following that night, when he’d avoided me like I was infested with the plague, my heart had shattered.