AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Potter’s bedroom, we used to call it. Pretty hard to find time alone in a boarding school, but the cupboard under the stairs up to her dorm room worked like a treat. No one ever knew.
I swallow.
“What about it?”
“About how we’d sneak away whenever we could and as much as we could. We were so in love, so doe-eyed about it…” She bites down on her bottom lip how I wish I was doing. “Feels embarrassing now, kind of stupid—” Her eyes fall from mine. “I would have done anything for you. Cheated for you, lied for you. I would have died for you. I think maybe I kind of did.”
“Parks—” I barely say because I’m choked up..
“Did you ever imagine it?” she cuts me off. “That we’d be the ones who’d hurt each other more than anyone else?”
Fuck.
I shake my head. “No,” I say too quietly.
She sucks her lip now. Nods.
“Sad, isn’t it?”
I drop the plate I’m drying on the bench, turn her body to face mine.
“We could stop.”
“How?” she interrupts. “Tell me how and I’ll do it.”
I sigh, give her a measured look. “Break up with him. Be the first to wave the white flag.”
She shakes her head, looks at me like I’ve lost the plot.
“No.”
“Why no?” I frown. Then she looks at me how a wounded animal might look at a person approaching it and I take a stab at it, nodding before I even say it. “You don’t trust me.”
Her face pulls tight. “How could I trust you?”
I shake my head at her.
“I’d die for you.”
“That, I believe.” She nods. “I too trust you with my life.”
“Just not your heart.” I sigh it out.
She nods slowly. “Just not my heart.”
“What — fuck. Magnolia—” I shove my hands through my hair. “What the fuck are we supposed to do?”
She gives me a weak shrug, breathes out an old sadness she carries for me.
“Just keep on doing the dance, I suppose.”
She walks towards me. Kisses my cheek. Properly kisses it, lips to cheek, hovers, breathes on me — what I would do to her on that dining room table in her boyfriend’s house if I wasn’t trying to be a better man…
I let her. Close my eyes. Let it make me feel everything Jordan hasn’t made me feel ever.
Breathe her in.
Beg her to marry me fifty times in a second but I can’t out loud because Parks doesn’t trust me and I don’t think I’m good enough anyway. I don’t think there’s anything I can do to make her trust me other than time, and I’ll give her all of mine, I don’t care about that. I’m not even worried if we never get off this track, I don’t care, I’ll stay on it forever with her. I am worried, though, that she’ll figure it out and get off it without me.
