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“It can’t be how it was before, Ruby. You can’t have that one-foot-out-the-door, keep-me-at-arm’s-length mentality, or I don’t want it, okay? Not any of it. It needs to be different. And you have to trust me. You can trust me.”
I can feel my old wounds starting to itch, daring me to pick at the scab and see if it still bleeds. I’m sure that it would. I could do it, if I wanted to. I could dig up the past and blow everything up. A few months ago, I would have done it without thinking twice. I would have called it being smart and protecting myself. I know better now than to act against my own self-interest. I can finally see the value in giving people the chance to surprise me rather than hurting myself for no reason other than to deprive them of the opportunity to do it themselves.
“I can do that,” I tell him.
“Okay,” he says. “Can I kiss you now?”
I nod and pull his face to mine. His kiss is soft and warm and everything that I’ve missed. If my heart beats, I don’t notice it. If I’m breathing, I don’t notice that either. But I do notice, instead, that every cell of my body seems to sing; I notice every hair follicle, each nail bed, and every lymph node.
“So, how different is this new beginning?” I ask him. “Do you not put out on the first date anymore?”
“Oh, no,” he says, laughing. “In this version, I definitely still put out on the first date.”
I take his hand and we make our way through the bar and into the night and our second chance starts the same way as our first, and that’s my happy (for now) ending. Love isn’t perfect—not that I’m an expert, not yet anyway. Neither are people. The best thing that any of us can do is when we see something in someone else that makes us yearn for more—more life, more waking hours, more days in a year, more small things that make the other person smile, more ordinary moments just to exist in together—is put away our pride and our egos and let our souls shine through.
Take it or leave it.
