Page 113 of Tempted Hearts
I told myself I left before Jules’ woke because I needed time. That was the lie I could live with.
The truth was harder. I left because I saw the version of myself she was beginning to believe in.
And I didn’t trust myself to be him.
If I had stayed, if I had said goodbye properly, it would have meant acknowledging that what we were circling was real. I’d spent my entire life choosing the thing that couldn’t be taken from me. The work. The title. The path that didn’t require anyone else to stake their future on my follow-through.
I left because caring meant risking becoming the man who promises and then disappears. I’d seen what that did. I’d grown up with the wreckage of it.
Walking away felt cleaner than staying and failing her later.
But this was it. Officially in writing. The ten-year offer I was supposed to accept. One I’d coveted for years. So why did it feel like a death sentence?
Because it is.
Accepting tenure at Columbia and then later reneging would significantly damage my reputation in academic circles.
And yet…
Accepting it also felt like I was trapping myself in a life built by my father. It hadn’t happened overnight. It was just a college, my interest in history as prominent as any other of my interests. I had no other ideas on what my future career might look like, so why not?
Then graduation, and acknowledging that I didn’t want to teach as much as I wanted to research, which meant continuing on to a master’s and then a PhD.
There it was assumed I would only apply to the top schools in the country. And I did, getting into more than one of them.
I felt accomplished. Mom was happy. But there had been a niggling in the back of my brain for many years—longer than I cared to admit.
The guys knew it. My sister knew it. It was only me and my parents who had been strong all along, even though it felt like a detour instead of a main path.
A knock on the door was followed by Mason coming into the room, double-fisting a beer in one hand and a whiskey in the other.
“Have a second?”
“Do you make it a habit of walking into your guest room unannounced?”
He handed me the whiskey. “Only yours.”
He looked down at my laptop. “Working? This is why you skipped Taco Tuesday?”
It was a running tradition the guys continued, now with better halves, to this day.
“I was coming down. As soon as I finish some things.”
Mason hovered over me. “No Juliette today?”
I thought back to her text. It had taken more than two hours for me to come up with a response. But I finally texted her back:
Cole
Thinking of you too. Hope you’re having a good day!
She’d loved the message but, not surprisingly, she didn’t respond.
I got in a run, grabbed some lunch, and had been working ever since until this email came through.
“No. I’ve been catching up on some things.”
I was certain he wouldn’t let it drop.
