Anna
Anna stared at the popcorn ceiling in her childhood bedroom, unchanged since the day she left for college. The baby pink room only brought back a thousand memories she desperately needed to push away. Eyes squeezed tight, she ignored the pieces of her heart that missed the boy who taught her how to love.
The doorbell rang in the living room, but Anna rolled over and covered her face with a pillow. Footsteps, then voices, filling the hall outside snapped her up against the headboard. The briefest of knocks sounded at the door before it swung open.
“Someone here to see you,” her mother said, a nervous smile on her face.
Anna scrambled to the edge of the bed as Drew slowly peeked his head around the corner.
“Thanks, Diana,” he whispered.
“You’re welcome.” She closed the door behind her, but she wouldn’t go far.
Drew laughed, leaning his back against the doorframe, a Cinderella poster hanging beside him. Anna had once been a sucker for fairy tales, but she knew better now. Prince Charming always walked away. He decided you weren’t good enough and crushed you when he moved on.
“Hey,” Drew said, that confident crooked smile bringing out the dimple she could never resist. She hated how much he still affected her. Or maybe she loved it. With all the conflicting emotions, she couldn’t be sure.
He stood there in her bedroom, completely blanketed with memories of him, including the box marked Drew and Anna hidden under the bed.
Had she tried to burn it?
Yes.
Had she blown out the match before it could erase any of her precious memories?
More than once.
So what did he want? She could place a few emotions swimming in those expressive brown eyes. There were nerves, determination, and joy, but could there be more?
“Can I sit?” he asked, pointing to her old desk chair.
“Sure.” Anna bit the side of her lip, not convinced she wanted him to, but at the same time wanting it more than anything.
Drew took his seat safely on the opposite side of the room. “So how’s your day?”
Her day had been emotionally exhausting, and she had the tension headache to prove it. “Good.”
They sat, both examining the light brown carpet with a blue nail polish stain next to his shoe. He’d changed from his med school hoodie into a charcoal gray Henley, sleeves pushed up, revealing strong forearms.
A reckless urge to run into those arms and straddle him flashed in her mind. She’d done it before. She knew the chair could hold them.
Drew pulled in a deep breath, blew it out slowly, then stood and closed the distance between them. Anna’s heart rate skyrocketed with each step he made toward her.
Pull it the frick together!
“I have no idea how to tell you…” he started. “There are so many things running through my head, and I want to make you understand them all. And Luke…”
“Luke?”
How much had Luke told him in the last eleven years?
Drew sat next to Anna on the lavender comforter, their shoulders touching while his knee bounced into hers. He was always confident, rarely rattled, but the almost undetectable bounce in his knee still seemed to be his tell. It made the aforementioned urge to be in his arms almost unbearable.
“Luke’s pushy as hell, but he’s usually right.” Drew wrung his hands in his lap. She didn’t dare look at him, but the heat of his gaze seared the side of her face.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
He chuckled. “I’m looking at you.”
“You don’t get to look at me anymore,” she whispered.
“Why not? You’re beautiful.”
“Because you left me!” Anna flew off the bed.
“I miss you, Anna. I have missed you for so long.”
She whirled to face him. “I stood on that riverbank and listened to you tear my heart apart. Begged you to change your mind like an idiot! I loved you so much, Drew. I waited for you to come back, and…you don’t get to pretend you spent all this time missing me!”
Drew stared at the floor, then raised hesitant eyes to hers. “I understand why you don’t believe me, and my apology isn’t enough—it could never be enough—but I am so sorry for ever hurting you. If I could take it back…”
“You can’t take it back. It’s still here, Drew.” Anna rubbed the center of her chest, biting her cheek to force away the tears. “I cried for months. Every day I wore your stupid football sweatshirt while I stared at our picture on my desk and begged you to come back to me. It took over a year for me to even agree to a date with anyone else.”
Drew stalked within inches of her. She took a step back, hitting the wall. He reached to touch her face but stopped mid-air. “And I watched you build our life with another man. I was an idiot, and I was scared, and I made the worst mistake of my life. But hell, Anna, I never stopped loving you, not for one second, and then I had to face that mistake and not rip the prick in two every time I saw you together. It was my fault, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.”
Anna squeezed her eyes shut, fighting for composure, fighting not to let herself be drawn back into his orbit because the pull had always been impossible to resist.
“You say you loved me, but you never came back. What was I supposed to do, Drew?”
“Not marry him.” Drew shrugged. “It’s ridiculous, I get that, but I couldn’t imagine my life ever being with anyone else, and you just…you could. You did.” He looked away and with a sniff wiped his hand across his face. “I didn’t come here to talk about him.”
Anna’s stupid heart pled with her to comfort him, but she couldn’t bring herself to touch him or she’d lose it. She didn’t owe Drew anything, but that didn’t stop the words from tumbling out. “He had to ask me twice.”
“What?”
“Mason. The first time he asked…I told him I wasn’t ready. He asked me on the riverbank. He’d seen the framed picture you gave me of our spot that still hung on my wall, and he knew the place was special to me. But when he asked me there…I couldn’t say yes.”
Drew tentatively placed his thumb under Anna’s chin. He lifted her gaze to his, the rich brown as hypnotizing as ever.
“Anna, I have loved you my entire life,” he said with a sad smile. “I know I hurt you, and I could never explain to you how sorry I am for that. I was a stupid kid, and I convinced myself I couldn’t be who you needed me to be. Everyone’s always told me I’m just like my dad. I was even planning to be a doctor just like him. Then I watched my parents’ marriage fall apart, and for months I let it eat at me that I would fail you, fail us. I was too scared to let you down, so I let you go and failed us anyway, but I couldn’t see it that way then. What does an eighteen year old know about anything, really?”
“Absolutely nothing.” She gave him a weak smile of her own, the burn of anger fading though she needed it to protect her from the other emotions churning around inside her.
“Anna—”
“Stop,” she cut him off. His stare moved to her hand on his forearm. She pulled it away slowly, her fingers lingering on his skin. If she wasn’t mistaken, his breath hitched. “It was years ago. We were just kids then. We’re different people now, and we’ve led different lives, maybe even made a few stupid mistakes.”
Mistakes you’d never forgive me for, so this could never work.
“Well yeah, but that’s not really the point, is it?” He gave her a cocky smile and raised brow. “Why are you trying to change the subject?”
“I’m not…”
Drew gently picked up both her hands, rubbing the tops. She closed her eyes, his tenderness overwhelming. How could he still affect her like this after so many years apart?
But she couldn’t fall for him again just to watch someone else leave her. She wouldn’t. The kind of emotional intimacy they had shared was stunning and wild with its fierceness. She wasn’t ready for that. She might never be. And the thought of being physically intimate with someone, giving them that power to break her, combined with Mason’s betrayal, had her breath quickening in a panic attack.
“Could you give us another chance?” he whispered against her ear. “Could you give me another chance?”
Could she? Even without the baggage from her marriage, the thought of losing Drew again seared her from the inside out.
Her head told her to put an Anna-shaped hole in the wall and run away as quickly as humanly possible, but her heart was begging to lean up a few inches and remember what his lips felt like.
“Sunshine?” Drew prompted with a half-smile.
Sunshine. It was always his secret weapon.
“It can’t work, Drew,” she insisted. “There’s just…”
“Okay. Give me one reason. Tell me something we can’t work through and I’ll walk out that door right now.”
“I don’t trust you,” she whispered, staring past him at Prince Charming on the wall. “I’m not sure I’m capable of trusting anyone ever again.”
Standing there staring at the first boy she ever loved, of course she wanted to believe they could have the fairy tale ending. Her love for Drew never really went away, but when he never came back, her only choice was to shove it in the very back drawer of her mind and ignore it. Drew had grown into a beautiful man, and the things he said were mind-blowing…making the drawer start to ever so slightly inch itself back open.
But she wouldn’t watch him walk away again. She couldn’t.
“You can trust me. Let me prove it to you,” he pleaded.
“I don’t…I…” Her lungs burned. There wasn’t enough oxygen in the stupid pink room.
An absurdly huge grin spread across his face. “Sweetheart, are you about to hyperventilate on me?” he teased. “Don’t worry. I’m a medical professional.”
His teasing brought her first genuine smile in months, and she shoved him playfully. “Shut up. No, I’m not.”
He ran his thumb tenderly over her cheek. “It’s adorable and sexy, and I get it. You need some time to process all this, and I don’t blame you. But here’s the thing.” Drew leaned in close, pressing his palm to her cheek, the simple touch causing her insides to tingle. “I’m not going anywhere this time unless you tell me no. It’s only you. It’s always been you.”
She bit down on her lip, taking in his words and the warmth of his hand on her face. He winked and moved toward the door.
As much as she wanted to follow him, she forced herself to take a seat on the bed. Drew turned at the door and took a long look around the room.
“Do you remember that summer morning I snuck over here when your parents were at work?” he asked, mischief in his raised brow. Memories of all the times he’d looked at her that way and what came after flooded her mind.
But she did remember. She couldn’t forget. “It was your birthday.”
His grin turned wicked. “Your mom came home early for lunch, and I hid in that closet for forty-five minutes until she left. You should’ve gotten an award for your acting job, you know.”
“And I was also hiding your shirt under my pillow.” He was shirtless. Those rippled abs stood in her closet for almost an hour. He didn’t even make the tiniest noise. Talking to her mother while her half-naked boyfriend hid a few feet away had been her best performance ever.
Drew crossed his arms, accentuating biceps that put the ones from eleven years ago to shame. “We were so wrapped up in each other, I have no idea how you heard the front door close or how your mom didn’t hear you throw me off you onto the floor. I had a bruise for a month from hitting the nightstand on the way down.”
His cocky smirk said the blush burning her cheeks could be seen even from his position across the room.
“Well, she’s probably listening outside the door right now, so I’m guessing our secret’s out. Was there a point to this trip down memory lane?” she said.
He stepped through the door to leave. “Nope. Love being in this room, though. Lots of…exciting memories.” His eyes were wide with amusement as he tapped the top of the doorframe once, those forearms and back muscles bunching for only a second before he walked down the hall.
And he left her there with the memory of his bare chest pressed against her nightgown as he placed slow kisses along her lips, her neck, her collarbone. That memory had been buried away for a long time, but he’d made it surface in bright, vivid detail causing tingles in places they had no business being.
There was no doubt she still wanted him. Every word he’d said only made her want him more, but her heart wouldn’t survive another break. Especially from the man who still held pieces from the first time he shattered it.