AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But Levi didn’t seem to notice her failure. Or, if he did, he didn’t care. Every skin cell burned as he trailed his finger along her jawline. The panic beating inside her couldn’t hide the intensity with which she wanted his lips pressed against hers. The fear didn’t stop her from leaning into him, from meeting him halfway.
Just as his lips were a whisper away from hers, the panic that had risen inside her surged out, shoving charming and flirty and casual out of the way. “I have HIV,” she said, then sat back against the cushions before he could reject the kiss. Reject her.
“What?” he asked. His entire face had folded in on itself in confusion.
“I’m HIV positive. I thought you should know, before we, well...” That last part was a lie. She didn’t think he should know before they kissed. He didn’t need to know before they kissed. HIV wasn’t spread through saliva. They could make out all night, and he wouldn’t be any more at risk than if he’d sat in a church praying.
But Mina had never mastered the timing of the tell, if there was a way to master it. She’d read books and articles on living and dating with HIV. She’d read everything she could find in an attempt to find the balance between telling someone about the skeletons in your closet early enough in the relationship, so you could judge if they were a person who could handle your particular set of baggage, and not telling them so soon that you were pushing them away.
She always told too soon. Or too casually. Or didn’t prepare them for big news coming. Like everything else, she rushed into it.
“Okay. Um, thanks for telling me, I guess.” Levi leaned away from her, looking her over for a long minute. Then he nodded once with a finality that might as well have been a slap across the face and stood. Mina watched as he gathered the ice-cream bowls and walked into the kitchen. When he returned, she hadn’t moved an inch.
“I’m going to head home. If you need help building another raised bed—”
She braced herself for the final rejection.
“—give me a call.”
“Okay.” Her voice was barely audible to her own ears, even though she had no heartbeat to drown it out.
He nodded again. He shut the front door behind him, and the possibility of their relationship clicked closed, too.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LEVI’S BLINDS WERE still open when he got home. The lights were on in Mina’s house, and he could see right through from his kitchen into hers. The ice-cream bowls were on the counter where he’d put them.
Mina only had good ice cream in her freezer. Dinner had been delicious, even if there hadn’t been any meat. Levi pulled everything out of his pockets and plopped his keys and his phone on the table, before dropping into a chair facing her house. He’d enjoyed himself at Mina’s. She’d been funny and interesting, and her face moved when she talked, and he hadn’t wanted her to stop talking, because he hadn’t wanted to stop watching her face move.
But then he’d been leaning in to kiss her, and she’d told him about her HIV, and the animation in her face had turned into pill bottles on the bathroom counter and blinds that were always closed and doctor’s visits and the heavy weight of watching someone slowly withdraw until the day you came home, and they weren’t there at all.
Levi rested his forehead in his hand, feeling the weight of his head and the way it pressed his elbow into the table. He’d caught his skin on the table in a weird way and he should move his elbow, but the pinching kept him from disappearing into the past. Into what he should have done better, the times he should have reminded Kimmie to take her pills and the times he’d reminded her too much. Into the last day when she’d said, “Don’t go to work today. I feel like something bad is going to happen,” and he’d been frustrated because he couldn’t find his keys, and he’d said, “You always feel like something bad is going to happen.”
Only this time, Kimmie had been right.
He dropped his palm to the wood with a slap, his head bouncing once before he righted it and stared again at Mina’s house.
Knowing what he knew now, knowing how everything ended, he still wouldn’t go back and change anything about the day he’d walked up to Kimmie and asked for her phone number. He’d loved her more than he thought was possible—still did. Every minute they’d been together had been the best minute of his life.
