“That was a joke,” Jase added. “He’s obviously not going to say that.”

“Right,” Abbie agreed. “Yes. Obviously.”

“I mean, you do realise he’s been the one desperately asking for this and you’re the one who’s been coolly rejecting him?”

Abbie’s stomach lurched. “Wait. What?”

Jase shrugged. “I’m just saying. That’s the dynamic, right? It seems like you hadn’t noticed.”

No. No, she hadn’t. She’d been so certain of her own … unsuitability for Will, it hadn’t occurred to her that she had the power to bother him with her nos and her can’ts. But what if she did?

Shit shit shit shit shit. Fuck.

“Oh my God,” Jase sighed. “You look like you’re about to throw up. Go and talk to him before you die of worrying.”

“Right. Yes. Absolutely.” Abbie put her embroidery on the coffee table and stood, her spine straight and her nerves wobbling like string cheese.

It was time to risk a little vulnerability for the man who’d given her all of his.

“You’re not being fair.”

That’s what Abbie had said last night, and the injustice of it had smacked Will right in the chest. Because how, exactly, was he being unfair? At the time, drunk off his arse and dizzy with her nearness, he’d had no idea.

Then he’d slept and woken up and watched the snow falling outside his window and actually used his fucking brain. He’d asked her to trust him, tried to tease out the secrets he could sense hiding behind her clenched teeth, but he hadn’t really shared his own. He wanted her to lay out all her vulnerabilities for him, knowing what she’d been through, knowing how she struggled—yet he’d held back the full truth of his own heart because he was afraid. She was dealing with shit he could barely fathom, and he’d been stressed out about a little light rejection.

“Wanker,” he told himself firmly as he stared up at the whorled ceiling. “You absolute wanker.” Then he got up and got dressed and ran for miles through the quickening snow because he needed icicles in his lungs, clearing his mind, sharpening his senses, helping him figure a way out of the mess he’d created.

It helped, as movement always did. By the time Will returned home, he knew exactly what he was going to say to the woman he loved. He just couldn’t fucking say it because said woman had been distributing cat breakfasts and bantering with her brother and grandma.

The urge to get Abbie alone burned under his skin as he ate breakfast, as he showered, as he dried off and stared at his hazy reflection in the steamed-up bathroom mirror. A beige-and-blond blob stared back at him.