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“Oh my God!” Sabine yelled, her heart ripping in half. And she’d walked right into it. She’d been so confident in her own ability to do the right thing when it came to Dave that she’d made the worst choice possible.
She squeezed the steering wheel until her hands hurt, and it still didn’t ease the ache in her chest.
“It was his step to take. Not yours. Not ours.” She shook her head, her stomach tight and unyielding. Her eyes burned and she blinked back the tears gathering.
The look on his face. The absolute betrayal she saw there.
Not anger.
Not rage.
Just complete devastation.
Wounding Dave hadn’t even crossed her mind as a possibility. It’s not something she’d sought out and yet she’d managed to do just that.
And now he was hurting, and she was the one who’d caused it.
She needed to pull over, she couldn’t see well enough to drive.
Spotting a parking lot for a clinic, she turned in and parked. Then she turned in her seat to face Max.
“Max,” Sabine said, breathing through the pain. She hurt in places she’d never hurt before. “I love him.” She swallowed the lump lodged in her throat and blinked furiously. “I love him so much. I don’t care that he has to have binders. I don’t care that he didn’t graduate. I don’t care about any of the things you think I could reject him for.” She held her hand on her chest, like it would keep her heart from falling apart. “I. Love. Him.”
Max still eyed her like he wasn’t sure.
And she finally saw what it looked like on the outside when she would get protective with Kara.
“You know how sensitive he is about this!” she yelled at him. A fresh surge of anger welling up.
“So do you!” Max yelled back.
They both settled back in their seats.
“We both handled that very badly,” she said to the windshield.
Both of them had let Dave down. And neither one even meant to. Relationships were stupid hard.
“Has he told you he loves you?”
She licked her lips, frowning. “What? No, not really.” She thought back to Thanksgiving. “He said it once. But it was hard to tell if it was something I should take seriously.” Tears flowed freely and she stopped wiping them away.
But hadn’t he been saying it in his own way for a long time now?
Every chance he got, he made her feel adored and special and cared for.
Wasn’t that love?
“Do you know why he can’t make plans?” Max asked.
She shook her head. Sure, she understood it as something he disliked because he wasn’t good at it. It just wasn’t one of his strengths.
“He doesn’t make plans because hecan’tmake plans.” The muscle in his jaw twitched. “It’s like the future is a myth. All he has is today and sometimes tomorrow.”
Sabine weighed that against her experiences with Dave. “It always feels urgent when we’re together,” she admitted. “Not like he’s hurrying us along, but like he’s grasping onto the moment.”
Max lifted a shoulder and nodded. “He is. The moment is all he has. He can’t picture what done looks like. His brain isn’t wired that way. Not even for things that you and I find easy. Like where we want to be in five years, or what to buy at the grocery store.”
Max sat back in his seat and sighed. He pressed his lips together and stared out the front window for a minute.
