I ran because my feelings for you still sometimes seem like a betrayal of Marianne, our marriage, my love for her, and her love for me.
My desire and affection for you are mixed with shame, and that’s not right. For either of us. I don’t intend to become emotionally or physically intimate with you again until that shame is gone, and I can stand before you a man free and eager to offer what you need and what I want to give.
In the meantime, we’re still colleagues. If you’re willing, we will continue to work together on the poetry initiative, although I’d prefer to do as much of the planning as possible via e-mail. Unless you wish it, I don’t intend to avoid you, because you’re my friend. If you need help with anything—anything—please call on me. Extended interludes alone together can’t happen, however, since I find you—
Well, I find you irresistible. Even when I should resist.
I need time, Candy. I don’t know how long. It may be a week. It may be a year. It may be the rest of my life.
Since I know we speak the same language, I’ll allow myself this: Of the three things I need to do to live in this world, I’ve accomplished two. Not the third. Not quite yet, even though I know the time has come.
Whatever happens next, please believe I regret any harm I’ve caused you, and I wish you only good things. You deserve time and attention and understanding and effort and affection.
You deserve love, Candy. Full-throated, devoted love.
I hope I can offer that someday.
If you’re not still waiting if and when I’m ready, I’ll understand. I want your happiness, and you are not a toy for me to stow away until I’m free to play.
(Not that I consider anything we’ve said or done together a game. Let me be clear about that.)
I’m so sorry.
Griff
No novel,no television show, no amount of internet noodling could hold his attention.
It flowed like a river to sea, inexorably, back to Candy. Always. Back to his mouth on her flesh in his classroom, and back to an e-mailed response that might come at any moment or never, depending on how she’d reacted to his flight that afternoon and his subsequent message.
Leaning back on his couch, he propped an ankle on his knee and jiggled his leg. Tunneled his fingers through his hair, which was beginning to resemble straw at the ends. Stared in the general direction of the television, where—because of the popularity of theGods of the Gatesseries—historians were discussing theAeneid.
Specifically, Dido. How, left behind by the man she loved, she stabbed herself atop a funeral pyre and burned to ash as Aeneas’s fleet sailed from her harbor.
Candy was no Dido. With or without a lover, heartbroken or not, she’d forge ahead, stalwart and determined. She was the rightful hero of an epic poem, rather than a secondary character or simple love interest.
Griff, though…hmmm.
He’d never considered harming himself. Not directly. But whether he resembled the queen of Carthage in other discomfiting ways—
Well, that was less clear to him.
Or maybe itwasclear, and he simply didn’t want to acknowledge the clarity.
Candy’s e-mail arrived before the end of the documentary, and relief mingled with renewed terror as he clicked on the message.
But he should have known, really. Terror had no place and held no purpose in his relationship with her.
A heart as big as the skies, he’d said, and here lay further proof.
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Re: An explanation and apology
Griff,you made me no promises, and you owe me no apologies. Any hurt I may feel, I’m experiencing because of my own choices. Thank you for caring about my feelings, though, and thank you for caring about me. Thank you for making your position clear.
Now let me do the same.
