The Biker's Regret: The Enemy I Became.

I held my line

(Reese)

I stood at the door for a long moment after it closed.

Then I turned around and looked at my apartment and tried to remember what I had been doing before he knocked. I had been making dinner. The pan was still on the stove. The water I had put on had boiled down to almost nothing.

I went to the kitchen and turned the stove off and stood there with my hands flat on the counter.

He had apologized.

I had not expected that. I had opened the door ready for another version of the same conversation we kept having, the push and pull of it, his certainty against my wall. I had not expected him to stand in my living room and say what he said plainly and without dressing it up. What I did was wrong. It was immature and cruel. I have known that for a long time.

No excuses behind it. No explanation that was really a justification in disguise. Just the thing itself, said directly, the way he said everything.

I pushed off the counter and walked across the room.

I thought about his hand against my face and how my entire body had gone completely still the second he touched me. Not because I was afraid. Because some part of me had wanted exactly that and had been fighting it for days and the fighting had gotten harder the closer he got.

And then I had pushed him back.

I had done the right thing. I knew I had done the right thing. He had respected it, stepped back without a word, no argument, no pressure. That should have made me feel better about it.

It did not.

I sat down on the couch and looked at the ceiling.

He had said he was going to pursue me. He had said it like it was already decided, like he had thought it through and come to a conclusion that was not up for debate. I am going to pursue you and I am not going to stop until you give me a real answer, not the one you have been rehearsing.

The one I had been rehearsing.

I closed my eyes for a second.

He was not wrong that I had been rehearsing it. I had been saying the same things in the same order every time he got close enough that I needed to say something. Fiancé. Mistake. Leave me alone. I had said them enough times that they came out smooth and certain and like I believed every word.

The problem was that the rehearsed version and the real version were not the same thing and he had seen that from the beginning and I had known he had seen it and neither of us had said it out loud until tonight.

I reached for my phone and put it down again without opening it.

I was not calling Ethan. Not tonight. I had already put enough of this on him and he had enough of his own situation to manage without me calling him at this hour because Noah had come to my door and nearly kissed me and I had stopped it and now I was sitting here feeling like I had done something wrong when I had done everything right.

That was the part I could not untangle.

I had held my line. I had pushed him back and said no and meant it. Those were the right choices. I had been clear and he had respected that and it should have felt like a win.

It felt like nothing close to a win.

I got up and went to the bedroom and changed and came back out and tried to eat something. I managed half of what I made and put the rest away and washed the pan and dried it and put it back where it belonged.

It helped less tonight than it usually did.

What I kept coming back to was the apology. Not the rest of it, not the declaration or the almost kiss or the argument. The apology. Because the Noah I had known at seventeen had not been someone who said I was wrong without being cornered into it first. He had been certain back then too but he had been young with it in a way that made it hard to tell the difference between confidence and something else.

The man who had stood in my living room tonight was not that. He had walked in, said what he came to say and looked at me the whole time like he was not afraid of what I was going to do with it. No defensiveness. No waiting to see how I took it before he decided how much he meant it.

He had meant all of it.

That was harder to dismiss than I wanted it to be.

I turned the kitchen light off and stood in the dark for a moment.

He had said he was not going anywhere.

I believed him.

That was the problem. I believed every word he had said tonight, the apology and the declaration and all of it, because Noah Prescott had never said anything to me that he did not mean. Even the five words that had ended everything between us. He had meant those too and that had been the part that made it so hard to come back from.

He meant things.

And tonight he had meant every word he said standing in my living room.

I went to bed and lay there and told myself that nothing had changed. I had held my line. I had made the right call. Tomorrow would be the same as today and I was going to keep moving forward the way I had always moved forward.

I believed that.

I also believed that somewhere across the hallway he had meant what he said.

And that was the thing I was going to have the hardest time sleeping around tonight.