Free Remember When 3: The Finale (Remember Trilogy #3) by T. Torrest Page A

drinking?” It was ludicrous to feel relieved at his admission. But the drinking, I could handle. Sex with a replacement, I could not.
       “Drinking doesn’t cover it. I got completely polluted.” He chuckled, but it was just a cover. “What about you? What did you do with your night after you kicked me out of your apartment with a raging hard-on?”
       It was so difficult to talk about, even after all those years, even with him sitting right there, back in my life, the idea that our future together was an established possibility.
       “Well, I didn’t sleep much, for starters. At all, actually. The next morning, I went into work, only to find I didn’t have a job waiting for me. Devin had fired me so casually, and I got offended enough to break off our engagement. But it was more than that. I realized he wasn’t… He wasn’t nearly the right man for me. That’s when I went back to the hotel to find you, but you had already gone. I already knew I’d made a huge mistake by not showing up the night before, but I didn’t realize how huge until I saw the package waiting for me when I got home.”
       Trip’s face fell. “Wait. You didn’t get it until…”
       “Right. That next day.”
       His hand clamped into a fist and a muscle was working furiously in his jaw.
       “ I died, Trip. I swear. I had no idea that you were trying to do anything other than take me to bed the day before. When I saw that lunchbox…”
       He grabbed me and pulled me to him, crushing his arms around me, trying to hug the pain from us both. The tears slipped down my cheeks.
       “ And that’s when you tried to call Sandy… to tell me…” There I was, in his arms, and he still didn’t want to believe that I had really wanted him. I couldn’t blame him. We’d screwed this up so many times before.
       “ To tell you I loved you, too.”
       He let out a breath that was part relief, part agony. We were both in tears, but he still didn’t know the whole story.
       “You haven’t heard the worst of it,” I said into his shirt.
       “It gets worse ?”
       “Exponentially.”  
       “I don’t know if I can take it.”
       “Well,” I started in, hesitantly, “I wasn’t exactly thinking rationally at the time. I mean, I moved back here but-”
       “I see that.”
       “It uh… it wasn’t really part of the plan.”
       “Then why’d you do it?”
       “ Well, I had already packed everything. I had no job and didn’t have much of a choice. The landlord already had new tenants lined up. I thought… I figured I’d be moving somewhere new. Hopefully, with a roommate.”
       I turned in his arms to face him, but wimped out and kept my face buried against his chest instead. My eyes were gathering tears again and my voice had begun to shake. “I’d rolled the dice and I lost. I’d gambled on you. I was coming to California to be with you.”
       “You came out to California? You were there?”
       “No, I… I never made it.”
       His hand stilled. “Wait. When was this?”
       “A few days after I got your present.”
       I raised my head to gauge his reaction and could see the understanding dawning across his features, putting the timeline into perspective, realizing what prevented me from coming to find him. But the martyr in him wanted to hear me say it. “What… stopped you?”
       “I’d have to say it was the fact that you’d just announced your engagement to Jenna Barnes.” I put a hand against his neck, buried my face in his chest again, and added, “When she got out of that limo… God, Trip. I thought I’d die. It killed me.”
       He wrapped his arms around me tightly, and I could feel his jaw clenching under my palm.   “You loved me.”
       “I did. I do.”
       “You should have come anyway.”
       “ Ha! That would have gone over well.”
       “ You could have saved me from myself.”
       I tensed at his words.