“Don’t worry, I’ve got the bill covered. Turn in your key when you go.”

“Fuck you, Blake.”

There, she said it. She’d thought it the night that he made it clear he wasn’t going to Rio with her, and now she had finally said it out loud.

She should have seen it coming. He’d already shown her he wasn’t going to stick around when he said he wasn’t coming to Rio with her. Of course he would drop her when it was convenient. It was when things got a little too real that she could count on him to bounce.

She knew that Jamie was hurting now, and that having Blake there would make a difference. But she also knew that it was an awfully convenient excuse.

“Nice knowing you, too,” Blake said.

And then he was gone. Just like that, her days with him were over without so much as a proper good-bye.

She’d once envisioned him holding her at the airport, the last feel of his lips, the hope that finally, in their last moments, there might be a chance for something more. Suddenly she couldn’t imagine anything more foolish.

When the door clicked shut, Julia cried so hard her shoulders hurt from shaking. She stood under the shower and the water mixed with her tears until everything felt like drowning and she knew that this was it. She had finally crashed.

Blake waited in line for a cab. He waited in line for a flight. He waited in line through security. He waited in line to board. When the plane took off, he felt like he was still waiting. Waiting for something to happen.

But of course it already had.

It hadn’t been definite. Not even when he’d said it out loud. There had still been time for anything to happen. For Julia to shake her head and tell him that if he really could go anywhere and do anything, he should come to Chicago with her.

Not an invitation that he backed her into, said in anger and tears, but a real one. One that she meant with every part of her.

But she didn’t.

Blake reminded himself again that he was doing the right thing. Maybe not the right thing by Julia, but the right thing by Jamie. He was determined to show the loyalty that Liam hadn’t. Relationships didn’t work out—people cheated, they left, they said they loved you until it turned out they no longer did. But Jamie had shown that friendship still meant something. And right now, his friend needed someone to supply the coffee and the booze and to make sure he wasn’t alone on his ass in Santiago waiting for his flight.

Blake knew the reasons he had to go to Jamie. Yet when he’d told Julia he was leaving, some small part of him had hoped she’d be able to talk him out of it, to point out everything wrong with his so-called reasoning. For one wild, crazy second he’d even hoped that she was going to say she’d leave her job for the rest of the year and travel to Chile with him.

But that was preposterous. There was no way she could do that and no reason she would. And so he wasn’t surprised but it still hurt like hell when she told him he was a good friend.

Like she wanted him to go. Like she was okay with him walking away.

Like this was a fling, nothing more.

But of course it was. What they’d had would never work in the real world, in their real lives, where they were completely different people who lived thousands of miles away. It wasn’t his fault for being the first to slam them back to reality. The one relationship he had believed in, that had given him hope after Kelley that some people really did find each other and work together and stay through all the ups and downs, finding joy in each other’s company even after so much time… The relationship he’d admired in the friends he’d met was over. Just like his.

Julia had said she thought there was something up between Jamie and Chris, but Blake hadn’t wanted to see it. Why was it that he never wanted to see it? Jamie had advised him to go after Julia, and yet he’d failed to realize what was happening to his friend before it was too late.

He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. How much had he ignored when it should have been obvious that Kelley’s heart wasn’t in it anymore? He wasn’t going to let that happen again. He wasn’t going to go out on a limb just to watch it disappear once she’d had her fun.

And he wasn’t going to let someone suffer through the shock of heartbreak alone. Not the way he’d had to, with no friend to support him because it was precisely that friend who’d caused such pain.

Blake’s stomach rumbled, reminding him he hadn’t eaten breakfast. The bag was probably still sitting on the hotel dresser, vanilla cream oozing out the sides, the pastries partially crushed from where he’d knocked them swinging his bag around.

He wondered if she’d bother to eat any of it. It was hard to imagine her ever standing up from that spot on the edge of the bed where she’d sat, frozen at his words. She’d been oblivious to the bathrobe sliding off her shoulder, the knot coming undone. He’d almost reached out to slide it back up. But then she’d cursed and told him to leave.

He’d thought her voice sounded funny, higher pitched or something, but his mind was swimming so he couldn’t really tell. He’d stood outside the hotel room until he heard the spray of water come on. He knew then that she wasn’t frozen. She was fine without him.

So he left.

Chapter Twenty

Julia was disappointed when the bus pulled into São Paulo and she had to uncurl from the fetal position she’d wrapped herself into in the very last seat. Stop crying, she scolded herself again and again as her final hours in Brazil ticked down. Did she expect Blake was going to drop everything and—what? Come back to Chicago with her on the spot, like some trinket she happened to pick up? Blake had his friends. He had his plans. He had his life. What had started as a fling could never be anything more.

She’d known the rules when she got into that pool their first night in Foz do Iguaçu. Somewhere over the week she’d forgotten them. But the rules didn’t change just because now she had feelings involved.

But didn’t he feel something, too? She couldn’t believe that things like this happened to him all the time—meeting someone and clicking with them so well, having this good a time over so many days and nights, moving from quiet to laughter to serious conversation with such incredible ease.

And the sex. Oh God, the sex. Would she ever experience anything like that again? There was no way that it was always so good. It wasn’t just that she had let herself go in a way she’d never been able to with Danny. It was that she felt something with him she’d never had with anyone else, period. At first she’d assumed that was just Blake and the way he rolled with everyone he was with. But the more time they’d spent together—the more they’d needed each other—the more she’d been convinced that this was something special, something different, for him, too. She wasn’t sure she’d ever find anything like it again.

So then why was he getting on a plane to Santiago while she was boarding for Chicago? Why had their last words been so mean? She didn’t want to remember Blake with that icy stare, looking so disgusted by her tears. She didn’t want to remember what she’d said. If he had come to her, put his arms around her, she knew everything would have turned out okay.

But instead he’d blamed her. After all the things they’d done together and all the ways she’d opened up to him, he turned around and told her it wasn’t enough. Maybe he was right and she should have been the one to take the leap and beg him to turn their week into something more. But why was that her responsibility? What if she hadn’t been sure until he left that a relationship was what she wanted from him? It was complicated, their lives were complicated, and yet he’d ended it all without giving them any kind of chance.