AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You can’t just keep catching me off guard and kissing me like that.”
He glanced up to where she stood in his doorway, feet braced, arms crossed, and he fought a grin.
That had taken a far shorter time than he’d anticipated. He’d thought she’d fake indifference for at least an hour.
“You don’t get to just come in there and kiss me.”
“That doesn’t seem fair at all.”
“What?” She threw her arms open wide as she asked.
“I mean, you’re allowed to come in here and kiss me whenever you want. That seems very unfair the rules don’t go both ways.”
“But I’mnotcoming in here and kissing you whenever I want.” She practically stamped her foot as she said it.
“Well, that’s your decision. I mean, you’re allowed to and if you want to…”
He let the sentence fade out as if the answer was obvious.
And to him it was.
“Cam.” She took a deep breath, wearing the face she wore when dealing with Tyler in a particularly petulant mood. “Let me rephrase this so we’re clear. You can’t go around kissing me—anywhere. We’re not getting back together. We had our time, and it was lovely, but that was the past.”
Cam nodded along. He understood exactly what she was saying.
“Right. I agree.”
“You do?”
“Absolutely.
“Okay…” She drew the word out in doubt.
“I want you to know what I agree with.” Cam waited for her to nod before he went on, sure he had her attention. “I agree we’re not the same people we would have been if we had stayed together in high school.”
She smiled. “Right. Exactly. I mean, more obviously for one of us than the other.”
“Maybe more obvious, but equally as true. Losing you shaped me as a man in a way keeping you wouldn’t have.”
“Oh.”
“I also,” he went on before she could add some Vivian-type commentary. “I also agree we can’t build a life based on who we were as sixteen-year-olds. Actually, I don’t think most people can do that.”
“Right.”
“We’ve gone down paths we couldn’t even have seen at sixteen. We’re completely different. We’re versions of ourselves we wouldn’t have, couldn’t have imagined. And even if we had, well, the versions of us now don’t match the versions of us then. Like, your path went way wide one way and mine went narrowly another. There’s no corresponding couple because we didn’t walk it together.”
She nodded slowly, as if seeing those paths making them into what their sixteen-year-old selves probably would have thought was incompatible.
“And I understand your—”Fearwas the word he thought, but knew her too well to say it out loud. “—concern about me romanticizing you, us, our youth. And maybe I do. But, Vivian, you’ve been back over a year now. I knowyou now.I know this version of you. And she has me in awe constantly.”
Vivian was shaking her head and had taken a step back.
“When I said I was still in love with you, it wasn’t an ongoing thing. It was an again thing—but realizing that somewhere, in my heart, there was a bridge that reached back to the past and linked those two loves.”
She took another step back.
“You can keep saying no, that I’m just trying to fix the past or regain that first love or all the other things you think, but I know one thing.”
