He nodded. “Both. A little too much tequila last night.”

She raised her eyebrows, surprised. Normally he wasn’t a big drinker, so maybe he’d been as upset as she’d been.

But she didn’t want to get further distracted. “Back to my point. You made assumptions. I never said I was going right back to California. I never said I was going to jump into another role. And I sure as hell never gave you any indication that, despite our agreement to begin a short-term affair, that’s what we’d ended up being to one another.” She paused for a deep breath and to let her head, which pounded harder the more worked up she got, relax a bit. She leaned her head against the pillow and sighed.

Without saying a word, he reached over, picked up the Aleve bottle from the nightstand, shook out pills, and handed them to her along with the juice.

“Thank you.” She took the medicine because whatever she’d taken early this morning had worn off. “At the very least, you owed me a two-way conversation before walking out on me in the hospital!”

A flush rose to his cheekbones. “You’re one-hundred-percent right. I was wrong and I realized it about three drinks in last night. Probably even before then but I was shaken up,” he admitted. “I heard Rebecca offer you the role. I heard the destination. You were talking so quietly I couldn’t make out what you were saying, but I made up my own narrative based on the past and complete fear you’d dump me and not look back.”

She shook her head. “Xander, when we were together this time, we weren’t the same people. We communicated with each other. We talked. I thought we were building something solid this time around.”

“But when I asked you to go away with me, you couldn’t give me an answer–”

“But–”

He held up a hand. “I realized afterwards what I asked for was ridiculous, leaving the same day. You had things to deal with first. But I’d had Rebecca needling me about screwing up your life, your mother pushing on her end, and my own insecurities screwing with my head.”

He picked up her hand and held it between his. “I let myself return to the past. In the back of my mind was the way I grew up. How shitty my dad treated my mom and how she always let him instead of having the guts to walk out. And I didn’t want to do the same thing and repeat my past mistakes. I just wanted to protect myself from ever being hurt again.”

“So you ended things first.” Exactly what Dash had told her.