His One Night Obsession

Everything I Did

Florence's POV

"How could you do this to me."

It didn't come out as a question. It came out heavy, weighted with everything that had been crushing my chest since my shoe hit that pink lace on my floor and my brain started doing the math it desperately wanted to avoid.

"I trusted you," I said, my voice breaking on the last word. I hated it. I hated that my voice cracked like cheap glass. I hated that he got to see me vulnerable, see the crack in my armor. My hands curled into fists at my sides, knuckles white, and I held onto the anger because rage was the only thing keeping me from completely falling apart.

Carter exhaled through his nose. He ran a hand over the back of his neck in that familiar gesture I'd once found cute. Now it just looked like a stalling tactic. He looked at me with an expression I'd never seen on him before. Something between guilt and defensiveness, like a kid caught stealing who was already preparing his excuse. Then he squared his jaw and looked me straight in the eye.

"Florence. We have problems," he said, his voice steady. Certain. Like he'd rehearsed this speech in the shower or been waiting for a chance to deliver it. "We've been drifting apart for months. You feel it too. I know you do."

The laugh that came out of me wasn't really a laugh. It was the sound a person makes when something is so wrong that the body doesn't have a correct response for it. A strangled, disbelieving noise that hurt my throat.

"No," I said, stepping forward. He actually flinched. Good. "You have problems. You've been distancing yourself from me. That's not the same thing. Don't stand in my bedroom and make this about us when this is about you and your choices."

He opened his mouth.

"I'm not finished," I snapped.

He closed it. For once in his life, Carter Donovan actually shut up and listened.

I pulled in a breath and let it out slowly, trying to steady myself. Then I let it go. All of it. Every single thing I'd been carrying quietly for months because I loved him and because I believed in us and because I was the kind of woman who showed up and kept showing up even when the person she was showing up for had stopped meeting her halfway. Had stopped meeting her at all.

"I have tried," I said, my voice rising now, and I let it. I let it fill the room. "I've tried and tried and tried everything. I wear your favorite color even though blue washes me out. I cook your favorite meals even though you never once offered to cook mine. I sit through shows I don't care about because you like them and I like being next to you. Or I did. I've been quietly working my connections, calling in favors, trying to find job leads for you since you lost the last one because I didn't want you to feel the weight of that alone."

I stopped. Swallowed against the tightness in my throat. Kept going because if I stopped now, I might never say this again.

"I've supported you through everything," I continued, my voice shaking. "Every mood swing. Every setback. Every morning where you woke up and decided the world owed you something and took it out on whatever was closest, which was usually me." The words tasted bitter. True, but bitter. "I made myself smaller so you could feel bigger. I dimmed my own light so yours wouldn't look so pathetic by comparison."

Carter's jaw tightened. A muscle jumped near his temple. I didn't care.

"I dress up for you," I said, the words coming faster now, years of silence finally finding an exit. "I wear next to nothing to bed some nights even when I'm exhausted, even when all I want is to put on my old college t-shirt and pass out, because I want you to want me. I've stepped outside of my own comfort zone over and over again to give you what you said you needed. Things I wasn't comfortable with. Things that made me feel less like myself. I jumped for you, Carter. Every single time. Without being asked twice. Without hesitation."

I stopped to breathe. My chest was heaving like I'd run a marathon.

The room was so quiet I could hear the hum of the city fourteen floors below us. Somewhere, people were living normal lives. Somewhere, someone wasn't standing in their bedroom confronting their cheating boyfriend while wearing a dress they'd bought specifically to make him smile.

"And this," I said, gesturing at him. At the bed behind him with its rumpled sheets. At the entire wreckage of the evening I'd planned. The dinner reservation, the gift I'd wrapped so carefully, the hope I'd allowed myself to feel. "This is how you repay me."

He moved.

Two steps forward, his hands closing around my arms, his grip firm but not rough, the way you hold someone when you're trying to talk them down from something. I felt his palms on my skin, felt the warmth of them, and something happened in my body that had never happened before in four years.

I felt sick.

His touch felt wrong. Like contact I hadn't consented to. Like heat in the bad way, the burning way, the way your hand feels when you accidentally touch a hot stove. My body reacted before my mind finished the thought, some primal part of me rejecting him on a cellular level.

I threw my hands up and shoved him back hard.

"Don't touch me," I said, my voice cold.

He stumbled back a half step, genuine surprise moving across his face. In four years, I had never pushed him away. Not once.

"Florence," he said, his voice shifting. Softer now. Strategic. I could practically see him changing tactics, reaching into his playbook for a different approach. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry for cheating on you. But if we just talked this out, really talked, we could fix this. We could work through it. People do it all the time."

I stared at him. At this man I thought I knew. At this stranger wearing Carter's face.

"You're not sorry for what you did," I said quietly, my voice dropping to that dangerous place, the place where all my certainty lived. "You're sorry because I walked through that door. You're sorry you got caught. There's a difference."

Something moved behind his eyes. The softness left like someone had flipped a switch. His arms crossed over his chest and he looked at me the way people look at a situation they've decided to reframe in their favor. Chin lifted slightly, jaw set, shoulders back. The victim becoming the judge.

"Look," he said, the word landing flat, businesslike, as if we were negotiating a contract instead of discussing the end of our relationship. "The way I see it, we have two options. We talk this out and we fix it." He paused, letting the alternative sit unspoken for exactly one beat, letting it hang there like a threat. "Or we go our separate ways."

He held my gaze, and I saw it then. The manipulation. The calculation. The absolute certainty that I would choose him because I always chose him.

"Your choice," he said with an attitude that I felt in my back teeth, in the clench of my jaw. Like I was the one being unreasonable. Like he was the one extending grace. Like he hadn't just been inside another woman in my bed, in my penthouse, on my sheets, on the anniversary of four years of my life that I'd handed to him willingly and without reservation.

Your choice.

As if there was a choice to be made. As if this was somehow on me.

I looked at him for a long moment. Really looked at him. At the man I'd loved, or thought I'd loved, or had convinced myself I loved because loving him was easier than admitting I'd wasted four years on someone who saw me as convenient rather than cherished.

And something in me went very, very still.