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“Hey, you okay?”
“I hate you for making me feel like this,” she says, her voice dull.
I smile and take a tentative step into her bedroom.
“Would you rather we didn’t feel so good together?”
“Yes. Because, maybe then, I wouldn’t feel like Venus must have felt when Mars left her. Except, you didn’t leave. I sent you away.” She drops her face into her hands.
My heart is a shooting star; I walk over and sit next to her, cross legged, and face the mirror. Our eyes meet there, and damn, if I don’t want to kiss her. “Mars never left her, without her, he wouldn’t exist.”
She throws her head back and cries, “Oh God,” and then, suddenly, she grabs her side, as if in pain.
Her honey brown skin glows like she’s just spent thirty minutes standing face up in the shower. Her hair is wet and hangs in wet clumps down her back.
I lean forward and sniff.
She leans away. “What are you doing? Why are you smelling me?” She scrambles to her feet. “Why are you even here?” She asks, her speech slurred.
“Why are you wet?” I remark.
“Because I just showered, Einstein,” she says her chin tilting up and her eyes glaring, “You haven’t even said..." she pauses to burp, or hiccup. I can’t tell quite which it is.
She blushes prettily and I can’t do anything but smile.
She’s a fucking mess, but she’s my mess.
“Now, go away before I vomit on you,” She says and points an imperious finger at the door.
“You wouldn’t,” I laugh incredulously.
“I would,” she says grumpily. She tightens her little silk pink robe around herself. And everything it’s clinging to is everything I’ve been craving that she won’t let me have. I need to get to the bottom of this shit so we can start fucking again. I miss that body.
“Tell me why you’re angry with me,” I demand.
She bites her lip and shakes her head miserably. “I’m not angry with you. I told you to move on and you did. I just hate everything because I want you for myself.”
Her misery is palpable, but I’m not sorry to see it. In fact, her words are music to my ears. If she wants me then, we can do this.
“Regan, we’re two consenting, single adults. I’m not here to fuck you and run. I want to make an honest woman out of you. I have since I was ten years old. I just had to grow up so you wouldn’t go to jail for being a pedophile.”
“Don’t be gross,” she mutters, but a tiny smile lifts the corners of her mouth.
“I did it. I’m a man. I can make my own decisions. And live with the consequences of them.”
“But you love your job, you wanted it so much, if they fire you, you’ll hate me.” she moans.
“Hate to break it to you…but if that’s the reason you won’t be with me, I’ll hate that more. You don’t get to decide that my job is more important than you. And, I don’t give a shit what your ex-husband or my brother have to say about it. We have something special. When is the last time you slept as well as you did the nights we spent together? Have you had any conversations as good as those? Has your body ever hummed the way it does when I touch you? Have you ever felt a connection as life-changing as the one we have shared since the instant we met 18 years ago?”
I cup her face in mine, tilt it up to mine. She shakes her head, her eyes full of misery.
“You won’t. Not in this lifetime. Or the next. Not unless it’s with me. But you’ve got to hold on as tight as I am. Or this won’t work.”
She stares at me, unblinking, before her face crumbles. “You don’t understand. I’m not…right,” she blurts.
“What do you mean?”
“I love you,” she wails, tears turning her dark eyes to a glittering obsidian. “Being with you is dizzying and exhilarating and exhausting and sublime in a way that I didn’t know anything could be. But…you don’t know what I’ve done…what I am. I ruined Rebecca’s and Matty’s and Jack’s lives. And I can’t make any of it right.”
