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“You don’t have to leave.”
“But you want me to.”
“I never said that.”
I wanted her, yet I didn’t want her. My craving to taste her, to touch her, to be inside her was only satisfied in those exact moments. The minute she left, it was as if I had never had her. Maybe if she was mine officially, our time together wouldn’t feel so fleeting. It was a new level of fear that every time I succumbed to her wants and my own desires, that she’d not only leave my bed and home, but leave my life.
It was as if I was biding my time before she fully ran and never looked back. It was a torturous hell needing her, but knowing she would never fully be mine.
“You didn’t have to. I can still look at you and know what you’re thinking.”
“Can you? If you really could tell what I was thinking back then, why did you never pick up on the fact that every time I was near you, it was absolute hell?”
She gasped, eyes narrowing into slits. “I didn’t realize being near me was a punishment.”
“Only because I wanted you so bad, and you seemed completely oblivious to the fact.”
I walked into the house, and she followed. She sat down on the stool, and having the urge to keep busy, I grabbed two glasses and a bottle of red. I poured, though I wasn’t sure if she’d even drink it. If not, I’d gladly dump it into my own glass. But she wrapped her delicate fingers around the stem and slid it toward her.
“I think I knew,” she said after a few moments of silence. “Deep down I knew. But to acknowledge it.” She traced the foot of the glass, keeping her eyes focused on the movement. “I didn’t want to lose what we had.”
“Do you ever regret it?” I asked, a question that had been on my mind since the morning I woke up alone eighteen years ago.
“Regret what?”
“Finally acknowledging it and sleeping with me.”
This time, she lifted the wineglass to her mouth and took a sip. Her tongue slipped out, catching the drop of red on her bottom lip. “No.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “You have a funny way of showing it.”
“I don’t regret it because you took one of the worst times in my life and somehow made it into one of the best. I didn’t just acknowledge your feelings that night. I acknowledged my own.”
“And what feelings exactly were those?” I was not letting her get away that easily. She wanted to walk down memory lane, then we weren’t detouring to avoid disaster. We were driving head on, and we’d deal with the collision afterward. “Tell me.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“Tell me.”
She’d skirted around her true feelings for so long, but she needed to come face-to-face with them and not run away from me after. She needed to tell me, and she needed to stay.
“What?” she exclaimed. “I cared about you. What else do you want me to say?”
“I want the fucking truth for once!”
I wanted her to tell me she loved me. To confirm that everything I thought we had was real, and I hadn’t imagined it. For years, I questioned everything. Wondered if she loved me at all. I needed to hear her say the words. I didn’t care if I was being a needy bastard, though I was, but I earned the right. She’d carved my heart up every which way, and I needed her words to keep it from being completely mutilated.
I needed her to see what I had seen all along. If she could look beyond the fear.
She downed her wine, slammed the glass on the counter, and spun for the doorway.
“Oh, no you don’t! You are not running away from me again.”
Her momentum stopped, and she turned toward me. “I’m not.”
“Aren’t you? It’s what you do best.” I stepped toward her. “Things get slightly uncomfortable or hard and you take off rather than having to deal with it. It’s why you’re here. Instead of telling Parker you can’t stand her shit all over your place, you say nothing and leave.”
She backed away. “Why are you starting with me?”
