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“And, yet you’re still here.”
It confused me that she was. She knew my reputation as well as anyone, and I hadn’t tried convincing her otherwise. So why was she here? There was something very close to a tug going on inside me. A tug that was insistently in her direction. There was that…connection flaring again. Something between us that made us understand each other.
She scoffed lightly. “I don’t know what you’re expecting to happen here, Lombardi. But I wasn’t under the impression your inability to change would have any effect on my life. Far as I can tell, we’re just two people having an extended pity party and you’re supposed to be teaching me how to skip stones.”
“You don’t seem particularly funky tonight,” I said, not sure why I was trying to make her admit there was something more going on here.
“Neither do you.”
I dragged a hand over my jaw. “Well, I had something to look forward to tonight.”
“If you have more important or exciting things – or people – to do tonight, I can skip stones by myself…” she said hesitatingly.
“I was talking about you, Barlow,” I said, hiding a smile. I didn’t promise things I wouldn’t give, but I’d give her the truth. If anything because I was worried she’d leave if I didn’t. “For some reason, you calm me. You make me feel…settled. Wrestling Maddy into bed tonight was a piece of cake knowing I was going to be meeting up with you after. The fact I might get to laugh at you was just icing. Come on, then.” I started heading for the lake again.
“Is this why girls expect more from you?”
That stopped me in my tracks. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I mean… What? You tell them not expect anything, then you pop out with things like that. I don’t blame them for their expectations if you tell them things like that.”
I didn’t talk to anyone the way I talked to Piper Barlow. And that wasn’t even a choice. She just…had an effect on me that made my mouth run away without my brain.
“Yeah no,” I said. “I don’t make it a habit to talk to girls. The wordiest I get is telling them how I want it or them.”
“So, what makes me different?”
“I’m not promising you anything either.”
“Aren’t you?” she asked, voicing my worry that there was something else going on here. Something that, now she’d said it, did feel an awful lot like an unspoken kind of promise.
I had to choose my words carefully here. “No, Piper. I… I like hanging out with you. You’re comforting,” I said slowly. “But I’m too broken to ever be good enough for you.”
It was quite possibly the one thing I’d been avoiding coming close to saying. I hadn’t wanted to voice out loud anything that put me and Piper in the vicinity of…more. I didn’t know if I was delusional enough to not want to lock the door on that, but I sincerely hoped not. More, I didn’t want to do or say anything that was going to ruin whatever peace we’d found together.
She surprised me when she nodded. “Okay. Good. We’re on the same page then.”
My laugh was relief, but it didn’t sound like it. “Exactly. We feel better together. Let’s not overthink it.”
I was feeling fidgety. I stalked towards the water and had never hoped for anything as much as I hoped she’d follow. It was the strangest feeling, to want to run away from her at the same time as wanting her to stay with me.
Because she made it easier to…live.
As much as I wanted to walk away from her and keep her safe from the shitstorm that was my life, I couldn’t stay away from her. She gave me a glimpse into a different life, a better life. The life I could have lived had things been different, had my father been different, had I been different.
So long as we kept it to this. To the lake, just the two of us, away from the world, I could keep her safe, I could make sure the dark places of my soul wouldn’t hurt her. So long as this was it, I could pretend that other life was possible. Even just for the few hours her smile was all mine, her laugh was all mine, she was all mine.
I looked back and realised she hadn’t followed me. She was hovering at the tree line. That feeling of getting away from her before I fucked the whole thing up gnawed at my soul, but I couldn’t even wait for her to come to me. I had to go to her.
I walked to her and took her hand. She came, willing, as I led her to the water.
“Lesson one, the closer to the water you are, the easier it is,” I told her.
She laughed and the tension between us melted. Everything was the same as it had been the last couple of nights. It was free. It was easy. It made living worthwhile.
