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“I watched you drive away with my brother that day,” she told me. “Then I went up to my bedroom and cried for an hour. My nose and eyes were so red and puffy that night, Mom thought I had caught a cold.”
I looked down at the carpet for a moment. “I haven’t treated you very well over the years, have I?”
“No,” Molly said bluntly. “You haven’t.”
I nodded. “I understand if you just want to kick me out of your room. I definitely deserve it. I just want you to know one thing before you decide what you want to do.”
“Which is?”
“I want to give this a shot, Molly,” I said, throwing caution to the wind and deciding to be brave. “I want you. I’ve wanted you since you were sixteen. When we had sex the other night, it was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. I was just scared of my own feelings, so I pushed you away like I did six years ago. I was lying when I told you I would have slept with anyone that night. There’s no one else, Molly. It’s only ever been you.
“In all these years, of all the women I’ve been with, you have always been the one constant. You were the one daydream I kept going back to. I don’t know if I’m going to be any good at a relationship. I don’t know if I’ll end up breaking your heart. All I know is that I want to give this one real shot, come what may.
“Because I just realized something. It’s worth the risk. You are worth the risk.”
I finished my little speech, knowing that I had just laid my heart bare for her. Now it was up to Molly. I stood my ground and waited for her verdict.
Chapter Twenty
Molly
It was something of a surreal experience to have Tristan standing before me, telling me things I’d been dreaming of hearing for years. The fourteen-year-old girl inside me was screaming at the top of her lungs, ecstatic and desperate to run into his arms. But the woman I was now was weary and cautious. They were beautiful words, but what if that was all they were?
“You don’t really know me,” I said. “It’s taken you this long to admit you feel anything for me; how can I trust that you’re sincere?”
“I do know you,” Tristan said.
I frowned. “No, you don’t.”
“I paid attention, Molly,” he told me. “Maybe that was never obvious to anyone, but trust me, I paid attention.”
“Before now, we haven’t seen each other in six years,” I reminded him.
“I realize that,” he nodded. “But when I saw you when you first arrived here, I recognized you. I looked at your face and knew you were the same person. Yes, you were older; yes, you’d had more experiences, you’d lived a little… But at the core, you were the same person you’d always been: kind, caring, affectionate, honest, and straightforward.”
I almost smiled—almost. “You never gave me any indication that you started seeing me differently.”
“Because you were only sixteen,” Tristan said. “I felt guilty for even looking at you that way. I told myself it was just because you were beautiful…
But it was more than that, Molly. I was interested in your thoughts, your opinions—and you had a lot of them. I remember the marches you used to take part in, the charities and volunteer work you used to squeeze in on the weekends. I remember that summer you practically lived at the soup kitchen.”
“You were only around for a weekend that summer,” I pointed out.
“I asked Jason about it,” Tristan told me. “He was so proud of you for sticking with it, for getting so involved with the community. I was proud of you, too. Neither one of us would have ever devoted our weekends for anything other than purely selfish reasons.”
I shook my head. It was strange to think that the whole time I was infatuated with Tristan, he had harbored some amount of affection for me—and it hadn’t been platonic. I went to the couch and sat down heavily. It was a lot to process, and my mind was so used to taking disappointment where Tristan was concerned that I wasn’t sure how to handle this.
He approached me slowly and sunk down to his knees in front of me. He took my hands gently into his own and kissed them softly, one by one.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t stress that enough. I said things to you that I wish I could erase now.”
I looked up to see his dark eyes were filled with emotion and what I read to be sincerity. It moved me, and I knew I was melting against him. It was inevitable, really; Tristan had always been my weakness.
“I’ve been in love with you for so long, Tristan,” I said. “Practically half my life. The first time I saw you, you were standing in my driveway, and I was staring down at you from my window. And I felt as though something had knocked me over. I could barely breathe, but I couldn’t turn away, either. I knew then that I loved you…and I’ve loved you ever since that moment.”
He looked at me intensely; he didn’t seem scared by what I was telling him, but I wondered how long that would last.
“What I’m trying to say is, I don’t think I can do casual with you,” I said honestly. “Actually, I know I can’t. I can’t just have a fling with you. I can’t just take things slow. Because the truth is I’m already way past all that. I’ve passed the threshold of casual and crossed over into serious. So if you want to try this out, then I need a real commitment from you. I’m not talking about marriage or anything… I just mean a serious relationship, one that doesn’t involve games.
