“That’s what you think.” She was smiling, but it was a vicious kind of smile, and he got the sense it was pointed entirely inward. “But you’re drunk. And you don’t know me. And you have no idea how fucked up I feel when it comes to things like this.”

Right now, his heart was glass. One wrong knock could shatter it into piles of fine, gleaming dust at her feet. He wrapped his arms around her and pressed his face against her neck. “Abbie,” he breathed, and he wondered if she could hear all the love and aching pain in that word. “You think I don’t know you? You think—that I wouldn’t want you if I did?”

“That’s not what I said,” she muttered stiffly, which was the final confirmation that it was exactly what she’d meant.

“You’re wrong,” he told her, and nothing had ever been truer. “I do know you. You try to keep yourself from me, but you’re not that good at it. And I might not know everything, but I can see that you’re hurt, and I can see that you’re scared, and I don’t want you to—just stop. I don’t want you to be different for me. I want you to tell me when you’re struggling with it, and let me hold you like this. That’s all. I want you to trust me.”

“Just—trust you?” She’d been melting ever so slightly, but at those words she pulled back, sudden and sharp. “You’re not being fair.”

“What?” He studied her face, the teeth sinking into her lower lip and the sheen in her eyes. “Why?”

“Because—because you have no idea what you’re asking me,” she said. “None. And I have no idea what you even want, not really—”

“Everything,” he blurted out. “Everything.”

“But I can’t give you everything! I already tried that, and it was—bad. It was dangerous. It was—”

“It wouldn’t be the same,” Will said desperately, holding her tighter. “You told me that. You told me that yourself.”

“A kiss is just a kiss, Will,” she said. There was a sadness in her eyes that looked centuries old, and he could feel her pulling away from him, like she was water squeezed between his grasping palms.

“Abbie—”

Bright headlights cutting through the snow, the low purr of an engine rising over the howling wind. He stopped, looked over Abbie’s shoulder as a car prowled onto Ms Tricia’s drive. Really, he knew who it was after a second of squinting, yet he held out hope that he was mistaken and this was a confused, midnight traveller who would soon realise his mistake and turn the fuck around again and leave Will to fix this, to fix the devastation in her eyes and that hopelessness in her voice that sounded like a crumbling heart.