Page 32 of Lifeline

He rolled his eyes. “Uh-huh.”

Annoyance splintered inside me, and I grunted. “Well, it was.”

“It never felt that way,” he said, bringing back the old argument. “It felt…perfunctory. Your way of making it seem like you were into me when your actions showed otherwise.”

I gritted my teeth. “And I told you⁠—”

“And I believed you…and believe you,” he said softly. “But as I tried to explain to you then, there’s a difference between what you think and what you feel. It felt like you didn’t like me, like you weren’t attracted to me. So I suppose hearing otherwise years down the road didn’t magically make that feeling go away.”

“Well, it existed,” I bit out and then let out a little laugh. “And exists, I guess.”

He hesitated. “I…yeah.”

His tone was odd, and I frowned. “What?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly, and I scowled. He caught my expression and grimaced. “Don’t give me that look. I’m not ‘hiding’ things from you. There are just some things that don’t need to be said.”

“Great, now we can go from justifying you keeping things because it’s too hard to talk about and instead make it sound like you have a noble reason.”

“I never claimed to be noble,” he grunted and then groaned in frustration at my scoff. “Fine, since you want to turn this into something it’s not.”

I expected him to shut down, take his leave and go wherever he wanted instead of sitting there. The number of times he’d done that in the past when overwhelmed with an argument between us was…well, I wasn’t going to play emotional accountant to figure out the answer. It was several times, though, so I was surprised when he turned around and met my eyes.

“I reacted like that because despite what I said, I remembered that when you left the shower room, you were hard, or damn close,” he said with a scowl. “So I had a moment where I almost believed you instead of thinking I did, alright?”

Feelings and thoughts, two different spheres that I supposed everyone was guilty of considering as the same thing. Feelings were in your gut, in your heart, and while they couldn’t be controlled, they could be understood and sometimes operated completely differently than the rest of you. Thoughts weren’t disconnected from feelings, but they were the one thing you could use to navigate your feelings and dictate what you did about them. The tricky part wasn’t in understanding that; it was knowing where the overlap lay and what it all meant, if anything at all.

I wasn’t in the mood to parse my thoughts and feelings, though, so I just said, “Great, glad that was proof enough for you.”

“I never said that,” Mika said, then winced. “That sounded more like an asshole than I meant.”

I raised a wry eyebrow. “What, do you need further proof?”

I’d meant it as a joke, something to throw back at him because I was frustrated and already weary of the discussion. I wasn’t expecting him to look shocked and lean back as if I had thrown something at his face. “W-what?”

It was my turn to look surprised, and to remember that while I was better at controlling my mouth, it still had a habit of slipping the leash and unleashing something I wasn’t prepared for. In that case, it was my ex-boyfriend looking at me in complete shock, but I noticed there was no horror or anger on his face.

I cocked my head, struck by an odd thought that…couldn’t be the case, but I had to ask, anyway. “Do…you?”

Again he looked taken aback, but he didn’t deny it right away. His eyes swept over me, and I would swear he was close to answering yes, yes he did, and yet…he didn’t. Which would make sense; I was, after all, looking my ex in the eye and presenting an idea that definitely shouldn’t be offered between exes still figuring out how to deal with one another. Except Mika had never been shy when it came to sex. The man could never articulate his feelings productively, but never suffered from that particular failing when it came to sex.

So either apparently, exes were one thing that could make him hesitate, or…there was another reason.

Oh.

Oh, of course, there was one other thing.

Not the fact that I was an ex…but the very thing he had already talked about. This…might not be because he didn’t want it, but because in his mind, he couldn’t bring himself to take that risk. What was it he said near the end?

“If you’re going to fix this, then just know it’ll have to be you that makes the choice, not me,” he’d said, his jaw set as he looked away from me. “I’m done making attempts only to get turned down.”

And how I’d hated the idea that felt more like an ultimatum because it left me open and vulnerable when I already felt that way about my issues. It felt like he was telling me that if I wanted to take the chance to salvage our relationship; I had to make the first step. I would have to make myself even more vulnerable to reach out to him, and the idea had scared me shitless.

Now I faced that same idea all over again, except circumstances had changed…and so had we. Except I didn’t know for sure that was what he wanted, or if he just wanted me to drop the subject and move on to something less uncomfortable. If I made a move, then I was throwing myself into the line of fire of rejection. To be shot down would be…devastating.

Yet to do nothing, to leave the awkward opportunity where it was and move on felt…awful. I had never liked leaving an opportunity behind when I finally saw it for what it was, even if sometimes that meant I did it anyway because the risk seemed too great. So what was I risking here? The peace between us?

So I did the one thing I’d done time and time again in the past when I was too scared to move forward but too scared to back off.