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“But I can’t sleep with him,” I went on. “I mean, assuming he’d go for it. I can’t.”
When I didn’t elaborate, Meredith waited a moment and said, “Why do you think that is?”
“Because it would be too much,” I said. “If we started sleeping together, I’d want to rely on him. I’d want him to take over. He wouldn’t ask me to change for him, but I’d want to anyway. I’d try to figure out how to please him instead of how to please myself and take charge of my own life. I need to be alone for a while, to understand myself. So the timing is all wrong.”
Meredith waited, her eyebrows raised just slightly.
“I think the sex might be hot,” I said, feeling actual pain at the thought. I remembered what his body had felt like against mine, the taste of him. “But what if I’m bad at it? What if he’s disappointed? He’s a rock star who has been with tons of women. I don’t know what to do with a man like that.”
Still Meredith waited.
“Don’t you have any answers for me?” I asked her, annoyed.
“You’re doing pretty well on your own,” she said in her calm therapist’s voice. “You’ve thought about this a lot. Still, I have a question. How does your current relationship with him feel?”
“Terrible!” I practically yelled the word. I wondered if there was someone in the waiting room who could hear me. “It feels terrible!”
“So there’s something you need that you aren’t getting,” Meredith said. “And it isn’t sex. What do you think it is?”
We didn’t answer the question, because my session was almost over. But when I got up at six the next morning and watched Axel leave his house for his run, I knew.
FOURTEEN
Axel
Fuck, I missed her.
It was that simple, really. From the first minute, Brit hadn’t felt like anyone else in my life. She wasn’t like my friends, my bandmates, or any woman I’d ever dated. She fit into a spot that was entirely her own. And without her, there was just an empty, Brit-shaped space.
What happened on Christmas Eve almost never left my mind. How had things gone from perfect to a disaster so fast? Sure, it had been Brit’s idea to kiss me. But I’d let it happen—I’d jumped all the way in. The worst possible idea, and I’d gone for it without a second thought because I’d wanted it so bad. I’d wrecked the fragile thing we had, and even now—months later, running alone on a frigid winter morning—I couldn’t regret it. It had been that good, and I was that selfish.
If the timing had been better, if things had gone differently, Brit would be in my bed right now, waiting for me to come back to it.
That thought stabbed me in the gut, so I picked up my pace, my sneakers pounding the cold, wet pavement. Brit and I didn’t work. We were wrong together.
I’d broken it off with both of the women I’d been hooking up with, told them to delete my number. They’d both been fine with it, which told me a lot about what I had meant to them outside of the bedroom. The whole thing had been businesslike and cold, because I didn’t matter to them.
That thought had bothered me. It shouldn’t, because I didn’twantto matter to those women—that was the whole point of our relationship.
And still I asked myself,What the fuck were you thinking?
Ever since I’d tried to rebuild the flaming disaster of my life, I’d been careful not to matter to anyone. Friendship was fine, but nothing deeper. Not with my former bandmates, not with my siblings, and not with any particular woman. Mattering to someone meant you could let them down, let yourself down. I’d let enough people down already. And when you’re first rebuilding, you have to have walls. If you just let everything in, you’ll go back to your old habits in no time.
But it had been years now, and the walls were still up. My walls were my new normal. Not mattering to anyone was my new normal. Filing Brit away with all of the other people who drifted out of my life didn’t feel good enough anymore.
So I ran. Because I’d somehow screwed myself into a corner, even after I was supposed to be wise. And I didn’t know how to get myself out of it.
I made the final turn and jogged the homestretch up the street toward home, my breath fogging in the winter air. The cold woke me up, made my body feel alive. I savored the stretch in my thighs and the burn in my chest. I needed to get my head straight. I needed—
Brit came down the front walk from Ellen’s house and stood in the street, waiting for me.
I was too surprised to process it for a second. She was wearing pajama pants and a T-shirt with a long, thick sweater wrapped over it. Her feet were in slippers. She must be freezing. What was she doing?
“Brit?” I asked when I got closer and could see the tension in her expression. “Are you all right?”
“I want to tell you something,” she said.
I slowed to a stop, keeping a few feet of distance. “Here? Now?”
