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He shakes his head.
“What are you doing to me, Zoe?” he says.
“I … I was just …” I stammer.
I’ve gone too far. He didn’t want to feel me pressed against him like that. I back off slightly. He looks at me as I pull away from like he’s burned me. He smiles a sad smile.
“I didn’t mean that,” he says, nodding down to the gap between us. He tugs gently on my hand, and I move back to his side, closing the gap again. “I meant how the hell do you get me to open up like that. The guilt? I’ve never told a soul about that. Fuck, I’ve barely admitted it to myself. And now here I am spilling my guts to you like this.”
I smile.
“Yeah. I tell my friends here that my parents died so I don’t have to go into the whole story. You’re the only person I’ve told the whole story to.”
He looks at me, a storm of emotion in his eyes. I can feel every one of those emotions inside of myself. Heartbreak and loneliness, abandonment. But now there’s something new that we share: hope.
“Maybe tonight was meant to be,” I whisper. “Maybe we were always meant to meet so we could save each other.”
He stops walking and turns to face me, not letting go of my hand. This is it. This is the moment he’s going to kiss away all of my hurt, all of my pain. He’s going to make me feel whole again. He’s going to fill the aching need for his touch, wake up the side of me I’ve kept sleeping.
He reaches out and lightly strokes my cheek, pushing my hair back. I feel a pulsing running through me at his touch. Parts of my body I didn’t even know existed begin to wake up. My pussy is soaking wet and my stomach is churning, throwing waves of desire through my whole body. Every nerve ending on my cheek is waking up, responding to his touch, and I take a half step closer to him, closing the gap between us. I wait expectantly for his kiss, imagining what his lips will feel like against mine, what it will feel like to press myself against his muscular chest and feel his cock pressing against my crotch.
He doesn’t kiss me. He takes his hand away from my cheek and all of my hope vanishes.
“Maybe we were,” he says quietly as he starts walking again.
I want to scream at him, to shake him and tell him I am his for the taking, but I stop myself. I don’t want to seem like I’m desperate for him, even though I am. I want him to want me, not to give me some sort of pity kiss.
We keep walking. We’re only half a block away from my place now, and although I desperately want him to kiss me, I know it’s not going to happen. A strange atmosphere has fallen between us, and even though I’m sure I won’t see Mac again—despite his agreement with my statement about us saving each other, it seems to have scared him off—I don’t want it to end this way between us. I think of what I can say to take the conversation back to the easiness of earlier.
“What do you do?” I blurt out.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“For a living,” I clarify.
“Oh that,” he says with a smile. “I’m in the military. Today is my first day’s leave.”
“Are you on leave for long?” I ask.
“Who knows?” he says with a smile. “I’m part of a special ops team. We go when we get called up. It could be tomorrow. It could be a week’s time. Or it could be never. I’m due to leave when I turn twenty-four. I don’t know yet whether to sign in for the rest of my career or whether to leave and find something else to do.”
I want to scream at him to leave. To stay right here with me, but of course, I don’t.
“It’s a big decision,” I say.
I curse inwardly. What a fucking stupid thing to say.
“It is,” he agrees. “I only enlisted, in the beginning, to run away from my life. But I adapted to military life quickly and I do enjoy it. No two days are alike, and your team becomes your family. And with them, there was no guilt. I would have felt the same way about them even if my mom was still alive. But at the same time, it’s a solitary life. It’s hard to build any sort of lasting relationship knowing you can be called away anytime and be gone for months on end.”
Is that his way of telling me we can never happen?
“But I guess that just means I never found anyone worth trying to make it happen with.”
