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“You don’t have to apologise for dealing with your trauma the way you felt was best.”
“No, but I do have to apologise for how I made you feel. Ellie.” He leant forwards, bringing his hand up to my face so he cupped my cheek.
“Max, you didn’t alienate me.” I wrapped my fingers around his wrist. “If we’re completely honest with ourselves, you have no obligation to me. I’m not your girlfriend or your wife, and you are entitled to handle your emotions in the way that is healthiest for you. I’m sorry if I made you feel like that wasn’t right with what I’ve said today.”
“Stop,” he said quietly, using his free hand to put the plates back on the coffee table. He shuffled towards me and slid that same hand up my thigh. “I… know where our relationship stands, Ellie. That doesn’t mean I have a right to hurt you with bad decisions.”
“Any way you need to deal with something that traumatic, that hurts you, isn’t a bad decision.”
“It is if it hurts someone I care about,” Max continued softly. “My silence hurt you, and I’m sorry.”
I turned my cheek into his hand.
I love you, you silly twat.
The words wouldn’t come.
I couldn’t say them.
This was the healthiest conversation I’d ever had with someone I wasn’t in a relationship with—and someone I was, ironically—but I couldn’t say the words.
My future was not his future.
And that was okay.
Sometimes, love wasn’t for you. It wasn’t your happily ever after.
Sometimes, love came into your life to teach you a lesson. About who you were; how to treat people; how to be a better person in general.
Maybe that was who were we to one another.
We were brought together to teach the other more about who we were, how to be better in ourselves, how to live the way we were supposed to.
I uncrossed my legs and swung them up onto the sofa, over his lap, and gently pulled his hand away from my face so I could rest my head on his shoulder. He obliged, wrapping his arm around me and holding me against him.
I didn’t miss how natural this was. How easily I fit against his larger frame. How neither of us said a word as we slipped into this embrace as if we’d done it a thousand times before.
My unsaid words rattled around my head like a bird trying to escape a cage, but I closed my eyes and desperately begged my heart not to force them out.
They weren’t words that needed to be said.
“Max?”
“Mm?” he replied, rubbing his hand up and down my arm. His fingers danced a tender little rhythm over my skin, the kind that made goosebumps erupt here and there.
“Can we stay friends?”
“What do you mean?”
“When I go back to London next week.”
He tensed. The pleasing sensation of his fingertips trailing across the skin of my arm dissipated with the stilling of his hand, and my stomach did a little somersault that ended on an underwhelming finale.
“Can we stay friends?” I repeated quietly, staring at the ornately carved, circular coffee table. “I’d hate to think that I’d leave and never speak to you again.”
“Oh, Ellie.” He rested his cheek on top of my head, drawing me even closer into him, but the tension never quite left his body. “There’s no chance of that at all. I will always be your friend.”
And just like that, like the snapping of fingers, my heart broke.
