“Are you crying?”
I shook my head, though his thumbs were already wiping away silent tears. “I’m not.”
“There’s evidence to the contrary.” He chuckled, and then his smile turned downward. “What did I do now?”
“Nothing.”
“I must’ve done something.”
“No,” I insisted. “You haven’t. You haven’t. I just keep waiting …”
His hand drifted from the side of my neck to my shoulder and down until he grasped my hand.
I stared down at it, feeling numb and also like I had been electrocuted, unable to move.
“For what?”
I snapped my attention back to his face. “For you to laugh at me.”
“What?”
“For you to say,Just kidding, like you did when I was in high school. Or maybe that this will last until the morning, and then you’ll say that it was a mistake.”
He was already shaking his head. “No, no, no, Bri. Nothing between us will ever be a mistake.”
“But it has been.”
“I was the mistake. Never you. I’m so sorry I ever made you feel that way.”
“Will you again?” I asked.
He didn’t answer right away.
“He’s not ready to date someone like you,” he’d said about his friend.
But what about him?
Did he deserve me?
Did he think that he did?
“No,” he said. “I won’t. I promise.”
Something inside of me needed to hear those words. “You sure?”
“I want to be. Yes, I am.”
“How can you be positive now?”
“Because I’m not the same person I was before. You know that. Since I was in that accident, I have been running around, trying to live as much life as I possibly could, and yet everywhere I went, it was the oddest thing. I went to Thailand. I went to Italy. I went to just about anywhere I could afford to, and when I ended up at one of the historical buildings or saw a person eating gelato on the side of the street, I thought of you. I thought of you all the time and the stories you’d probably be telling me as we traveled together.”
“It’s been years.”
“So?” he insisted. “Doesn’t mean I fucked up any less. Doesn’t mean that I haven’t had plenty of time to recognize that I have been looking for our story in every experience and every relationship I tried to create on my own, but it doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t mean that when I looked at you then or now that I don’t want to imagine what you taste like.”
I didn’t think it was possible, but I hissed.
I wanted him to find out.
