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“You do.”
“I do.”
“Because you just met me. We had kind of a weird week. I don’t really expect—”
Ben kissed her again, more insistently this time. Hot and deep, until her fingers found the hair at the back of his neck and pushed hard against his scalp.
“That’s so good,” she said after a minute. She kissed his chin and his neck and his jaw. She kissed his mouth again. “Why is that so good?”
“I always thought it was you.”
She laughed with a soft exhale of breath through her nose. “Did I hear you say in the kitchen that you went home?”
“Not home. To the farm.”
She studied his expression. “That bad?”
“Worse.”
“Why did you go?”
“Because … because I didn’t trust that I could be any good for you.”
“Something about us scares you.”
He didn’t want to admit that. He wanted to tell her he was totally confident. That he had the future all mapped out, and his palms weren’t sweating.
But he wanted her with him more, and assuming she stayed close, she’d figure out all his secrets soon enough.
“Yeah,” he said. “Because I feel too much. I don’t trust it—that passion or whatever it is that makes me fly off the handle or get so excited about something I give my whole life over to it. I can feel it happening, and I want it, but it’s hard for me not to worry that it’s … I don’t know. Something I need to cut out before it gets too big.”
“Before you lose it, or before it hurts you?”
“Does it have to be one or the other?”
She shook her head.
“Both, then,” he said. “Jesus. I think both. And before it hurts you, too.”
“So you ran.”
“I tried to. But the farm, when I saw my dad … He’s a miserable old man. His kids are terrified of him. They were scared of me, too, and I hated that. I hated that they saw him when they looked at me, but even worse—it wasn’t even that I saw myself when I looked at them. It was like I was them. Only from the outside, so I could see clearly that they hadn’t done anything to deserve it.”
He took a deep breath, gazing across the porch and over the yard. “They’re only kids,” he said.
“So were you.”
He would have agreed with her, but the lump in his throat took a minute to ease up, and by then, he thought it was more important to tell her something else. “I decided I’m not going to be like him. Or like my mother, either. Life isn’t some zero-sum game where you have to be either the aggressor or the victim, right? So I don’t have to keep attacking what I love just because I’m afraid if I don’t, I’ll get hurt. It’s not a genius strategy.”
“No, it kind of sucks, as strategies go.”
“It sucks a lot. And I don’t want to miss out on all the good stuff because I don’t have the tools to deal with the bad stuff. I’ll find the tools instead. It’s not like I’m the only person on the planet with this problem. There’s got to be a way to fix me.”
“I think you’re already getting better.”
“Don’t flatter me.”
“I’m not. You should see yourself with the bees, or on the rooftop working with the vegetables. You’re so calm, I think it must be kind of like …”
