“I thought about you when you left for basic, and when Sully told me you’d been selected for Special Forces training, and every day you were in the evaluation process. Every day. I missed you so much that I wasn’t sure how people kept breathing with that kind of pain, you know?” She looked up at the sky. “I missed you every day for ten years, Cam.”

I knew exactly the kind of pain she meant, because I’d carried it with me, learning to exist around it, to bury it, only to have it resurface time and again. And she was here, within arm’s reach, and I still couldn’t ease that damned pain. I wouldn’t let myself.

“We can’t do this,” I said softly.

Slowly, she brought her eyes back to meet mine in challenge. “Why?”

“You know why.” Logic told me to end it there. To swim over to the other ledge, grab my clothes, and get the hell out before this went anywhere we couldn’t come back from. “I should go. I never should have come, and I knew it.”

“But you came anyway.” She shifted up on her knees, and goose bumps covered her shoulders.

“I have a hard time staying away from you,” I admitted. I could offer her the same honesty she gave me. I owed her at least that much. “Always have. Darkness is drawn to the light, right? And there’s nothing brighter in this town than you.”

She softened at the compliment, and I instantly wanted to take it back. I should be shoving her as far away from me as possible, not saying shit to make her come closer.

“You have a choice. You’ve always had a choice.”

“Not when it came to you. I was never good enough. I’m still not. This”—I gestured between us—“can never happen.”

“I decide who’s good enough for me, not you,” she argued, slipping to the side so we were only a couple of feet apart.

“Then, think again, because all I’m good for is building things and destroying people. I destroyed you once, too.”

She flinched.

“I saw your tears, your heartbreak when I brought him home. I know what I did to you.”

“Sullivan’s death was not your fault,” she said in the same tone she’d used when we’d had the same fight in the kitchen. The same fight we’d have forever if I gave in to what I wanted. It didn’t matter how many times she said it. Sully’s death was on my hands.

“Keep telling yourself that, Willow.”

“I’ll keep telling you until you believe it,” she promised, coming up on her knees and taking my face between her hands. “You told me your ugliest truth that day, but you never let me say mine.”

“As if anything you have could compare.” The air between us was charged.