Free BREATHE: A Billionaire Romance, Part 3 by Jenn Marlow Page B

control over me.
    I collapsed beside him, only to nuzzle him sweetly.
    “I love you,” he said firmly, just before wrapping his arms around me and pulling me into the most beautiful kiss that I had ever experienced.
    “I love you, too,” I replied, pulling back mere centimeters from his heated lips.
    “Are you going to stay with me?” he asked, his eyelashes blinking adorably.
    I smiled. “If you want me to.”
    He looked at me for a moment, blinking. I wondered what he was thinking.
    “Will you be my girlfriend?” he asked, sweetly, delirium clearly setting in. He had to be exhausted.
    I wondered how he kept up such an energetic sex life with him being sick and all.
    But as soon as he asked the question, I felt my heart lurch and pang in my throat, just before the brim of my eyes began to burn. I was about to cry.
    I didn’t answer him; I thought it was an obvious answer. I thought I already was.
    However, actually labeling myself as his girlfriend scared me. I wasn’t sure what was actually in that label that worried me. I already loved him. But it did… it worried me.
    “Are you staying?” he asked, half asleep.
    “I said if you want me to,” I replied, cupping his cheek in my hand.
    “You can go home if you’d like…” he sighed into his pillow, and as soon as he said it, he drifted off to sleep.

Chapter 13
     
    The truth was, I needed normalcy, if only for a moment. I went home when he gave me the option to do so. I really wanted to be there for him, but I also needed to take a step back for a moment. I wasn’t happy about it.
    Hell, I felt miserable even doing so…
    But if he had actually wanted me to stay, he would have told me to stay, right?
    I growled in frustration and grabbed the remote off of Polly’s thigh and turned the channel. We hadn’t even spoken since I had been home. She didn’t notice that I was upset; and I hadn’t talked about her play.
    We were both too enthralled with the TV to do anything for or with one another. But that was perfectly fine with me.
    The less I had to talk about my feelings, the better.
    I sighed and grumbled, all at the same time, hoping that the mindless contraption in front of me would warp my brain into a state of numbness that would inevitably lead to me forgetting the fact that I was in love with a dying man.
    “Are you alright?” Polly asked, finally paying me some sort of attention, but I really didn’t want it. I just wanted to forget. I wanted to lose myself in the abyss of horrible television; I wanted to become Polly for a moment.
    I grumbled a little more, more to myself than to her. Incoherent words dribbled from my lips as I watched some woman fleeing from a man-eating monster in the most ridiculous way imaginable. She was clad in hardly any clothing and kept stumbling with nearly every step she took. A turtle monster could have caught up with her.
    I rolled my eyes, just before I felt movement.
    “Tell me what’s wrong with you!” Polly snapped, jumping on me.
    And I wasn’t sure what it was; if it was the horrific emotional state that I was in, or if it was just that I really just wanted her to ask me after all this time, but I spilled it. And when I say, I spilled it, I let it all pour out.
    Everything.
    Derek’s illness, my shittiness as a friend, my shittiness as an employee, and my shittiness as a girlfriend. Everything.
    “You’re an idiot!” she said shoving me. “You should know better than to leave him like that!”
    I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but I had something to say regarding me ‘leaving him’.
    “He’s going to leave me,” I muttered, bitterly.
    “Not on purpose,” she said and sighed, clearly frustrated. “It isn’t his fault that he’s dying; don’t make him feel like it is.”
    “I love how nonchalant everyone is about the fact that he’s dying!” I screamed, flicking my thumb over the power button on the remote. “He would have told me not to go if he needed me to be there when he