She tilts her head to the side. “I remember you kept silencing it during the night.”
Yeah, I had.
“My parents seem to exist to make themselves and everyone around them miserable.”
Her fingers tighten on mine. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that your dad was an absentee asshole and I’m so sorry for that. But”—I turn my hand over, lace our fingers together, needing the contact to admit to something that I’ve never told anyone else—“I used to wish they would leave.”
“Your dad?”
I nod. “Or my mom. Or maybe both. I just?—”
“Excuse me,” the woman from the coffee counter says, carefully setting our mugs on the table.
“You just…what?” Harper asks gently when we’re alone again.
“This is going to sound like some pathetic sob story,” I preface. “I know I’m lucky to have two parents, especially two parents who stayed together until I was settled in my life.”
“They’re divorced now?” she asks.
I nod. “And both are remarried…and I think that’s part of why I left too. Because they have new partners and yet it’s the same old messy shit.”
“What do you mean?”
“At first I thought the universe threw them together to make each other—and me by proxy—miserable.” My temple throbs. “But they’re the same way with their new partners, so I started thinking—believing—that they’re just miserable people.”
“They fought a lot?”
“Constantly,” I say. “They’d fight and then come to me—my dad bitching to me about my mom, my mom crying to me about how mean my dad was to her. It was a constant cycle and I was in the middle of it, trying to play peacemaker.”
“I’m sorry, Leo. That sounds awful.”
I shrug. “It’s just…what it was. And”—this is the hard part—“what I thought it was, was love.”
Her brows drag together.
“Every argument with them would end with them saying how much they loved each other—Dad couldn’t leave because he loved my mom too much, Mom couldn’t leave because she couldn’t bear to be apart from the love of her life.” I take a breath. “So, when I felt what I did with you, how big it was, how much I wanted it…”
“You couldn’t chance it.”
“I meant what I said when I told you I couldn’t wait to see you again. I meant it with every cell in my body.” I sigh. “Then I woke up and my phone was filled with missed calls and text messages from my parents with the same old shit. And I started thinking what if I become that, what if I do that to you, what if this one night turns into a thousand nights of fighting and hating each other and…I couldn’t do that to you.”
I grind my teeth together.
“I just—” My voice breaks. “I just couldn’t do that to you.”
Twenty-Nine
Harper
This man is breaking my heart.
Blinking back tears, I pull my hand from his, and the subsequent look on his face kills me.
But I shove that away, because I’m already moving, already rounding the table.
Already plunking myself into his lap.
