Fantastic job blurting it out, Anastasia. Why don’t you just add in there how you’ve been hopelessly in love with him since you first met?
“You can pretend all you want that you don’t have feelings for him, just like he can pretend all he wants that he hasn’t been head over heels for you since he moved to town. Neither of you fools me, though.”
“Attraction isn’t enough to build a relationship. That’s all that’s between us. Tension. We’ll burn hot and fast, and then it’ll be over before it ever began.” Taking what little hope we have of fixing our friendship. But is that even possible at this point? Or has too much damage already been done?
“Why do you think you said no to Jack?”
“Because I didn’t love him. Not the way he deserves.”
“And why is that?”
“I—the spark was missing,” I say.
“Does that spark exist with Sawyer?”
I think back to last night.
To the way he gripped my arm and held me close. To the fire burning in my veins while I silently begged him to snap.
“I’m not sure how much longer I can keep it from going off.”
It was a delicate threat. A promise, even. But what did it mean?
That I would hurt him?
Or he would hurt me?
And why don’t I care if it’s the latter?
“I think you already know,” my mom says.
“Sawyer has never made any kind of move toward pursuing a relationship with me, Mom.”
“What do you know about Sawyer’s life before the military?”
“Not a lot,” I admit. I know he was in and out of foster care, but that’s about it. I never got the impression it was an overly great childhood, but he’s never gone into it.
“Exactly. A man doesn’t shield his past from view because he’s proud of it. You keep saying that in six years, he never made a move past friendship…did you ever give him a reason to think it would be okay?”
I gape at her. “So you’re saying this is my fault?”
“Of course not. But sometimes you come across as guarded, honey. I think losing your dad when you did gave you a reason to put up walls that you don’t take down often. Losing Violet only thickened those barriers.”
The mention of my childhood friend brings a fresh wave of pain crashing down on top of me.
“Sawyer being in the business he was, fighting someone else’s battles, left you open to losing him, too, so you held him at arm’s length. But he’s still here, sweetheart.”
He almost wasn’t.
The image of a blood-stained sidewalk swims to the front of my memory. Sawyer not answering his phone…I almost did lose him. He’d gone out for a run and not come back. Not until my brother, Garrison, and Ryker found him bleeding out from a gunshot wound.
My mom reaches across and covers my hand with hers. “I’m not saying jump all in. And the distance he put between you two without giving you any explanation at the time wasn’t fair. But can you try to put yourself in his shoes? What if he had told you how he felt? Would you have left Jack?”
No.
The truth behind that single word hits me in the gut. I wouldn’t have left Jack. Not because I didn’t feel something for Sawyer but because his friendship was too important to me to risk on anything. I would have pushed him away, likely ending our friendship much in the same way he did by keeping his distance.
Thanks for the hard truth, Mom. I rub the heel of my palm against my chest.
