“You’re so wrong.” She sighs sadly.

“Yeah, well … I see things differently now, but I still think it would have been a damn hard road for us then, and I’m not sure I would have been strong enough to make sure it was one we traveled with no trouble.”

“You hurt me, Nate.”

I take a deep breath and give her the rest of it. “Yeah … I hurt me too.”

She jerks in my arms, visibly shocked at my admission.

“Denying what I felt. Hurting you to push you away. Knowing deep down that I would regret that moment for a long time coming. Being without you for the last three years, yeah … that hurt me too.”

She pulls her hand from my hold and shifts in my lap until she is facing me with her knees on either side of my thighs. “You never acted like it,” she accuses, her hands coming up to rest on my chest as she searches my eyes, running her gaze down my face and over my features.

“Because it was easier to act like I didn’t have a care in the world than to admit that I was wrong and risk you rejecting me like I did you.”

And that’s the truth of it, something that I didn’t even realize until recently when I forced myself to really think back to why I pushed her away. The reasons behind denying us what we both wanted.

“I never—” she starts, but I stop her with a shake of my head.

“It’s in the past, Em. A wise man once told me that looking back wouldn’t do anything but make the hurt grow a little bigger.”

“I’m not sure I agree with that,” she tells me.

I smile. “Yeah, maybe not, but my dad’s got some years on him and he’s been through enough shit that I’m going to take his word for it. If we’re going to make anything of our future, Em, we’re going to have to stop looking in the past. All that’s going to do is stop us from creating our forever.”

Her face is comical when I finish. Her beautiful brown eyes round and huge in disbelief. Her lips parted slightly and I don’t even need to look down to know that her tits were heaving beneath her tank top. A thought that I should have tried to ignore because, not even a second later, I watched her face flush when my cock jumped against her core.

She shifts, and it jumps again. I quickly take hold of her thin hips with one hand grasped tightly on each side of her waist. “Don’t you move,” I demand through clenched teeth.

Her eyes leave mine, and she drops her head. A submissive move that I don’t miss in the least. My cock pulses violently at the thought of taking control of her while I fuck her in this position. Not letting her top from the bottom while I show her who holds the reins.

“Look at me,” I command in a hard tone, fucking thrilled when she instantly gives me those eyes again. “You need to let that go. For us to move on and forward, we can’t do that successfully if you’re holding that against me. I can’t change it, but I can promise you that I will never willingly hurt you again. Understand?”

She nods, swallowing audibly, and I know the controlling and dominating side of me that I normally only let out when I’m in the bedroom is turning her the fuck on. I always thought that Ember might be a sexual submissive but to have that confirmed feels damn good.

“Time to move on?” I probe while looking into her eyes and caressing the soft skin at her hips where her shirt had ridden up. “This next part isn’t going to be better, but we need to clear the whole table, and in order to do that, I need you to fill in a whole bunch of blanks I have right now.”

She goes wooden in my arms, and I fucking know she understands where I’m going with this.