What He Doesn't Know (What He Doesn't Know Duet, #1)

by Kandi Steiner

Charlie Reid was married, she was Charlie Pierce now, and still, it didn’t matter. I loved her, anyway.

Reese was a bird landing softly in the rough seas of my life, seemingly out of place yet so confident and calm in his landing that it only made sense he belonged.

“Books aren’t meant to be in perfect shape,” she said when we reached her room. “They’re meant to be read, to be inhaled like oxygen.” Her fingers ran over the spine again, and she smiled. “This book has been breathed. It’s been loved.”

Those marks on your stomach, while they are forever a part of you, they do not define you. They are not a sign of your weakness or of your failure.” I smiled then, rubbing the pad of my thumb along her cheek. “They are a reminder of your strength, of your love, and of the miracle of life.”

A beautiful, strong, broken shell of a woman whom I wanted so desperately to save.

No one is the same once they lose someone they love.

They just have to learn to exist in the new world, no matter how messy it is.

I wondered if we’d ever really be in the same room ever again.

I would be her friend, her best friend, and I would sit back and let her see what it could be like to be heard again, to be loved again — the way she deserved to be.

Charlie was desperate for Cameron to love her the way he used to, and he was oblivious.

It was as if she’d been dying from pain for years, and I was her morphine.

No, we saw the black holes — we became them — two blazing suns burning up in each other’s atmosphere. That feeling, that moment when I was finally inside her after years of both of us wanting it, there was nothing comparable to that pleasure — to that pure, unabashed bliss.

Reese Walker understood me — maybe more than I understood myself. And he loved me.

I came to you because it’s always been you, Reese.

“If I am a river, you are the ocean. It all comes back to you in the end.”

They say there are two sides to every story, and it was in that moment, in that dark, desperate snapshot of my life that I realized I hadn’t asked him for his.