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He regards me carefully, but I suppose because I’m calm and blasé about it, he feels comfortable admitting it. “I want someone who can’t leave.”
I nod slowly. I’m sensing some deep-seated abandonment issues. “Do you realize that by not giving someone the ability to leave, you’re also stripping away their ability to choose you?”
A frown flickers across his face as if perhaps he hadn’t considered that, but it eases after a moment and he smiles a very faint, self-deprecating smile. “Once they know the real me, who would, anyway?”
My heart contracts with sympathy. Stupid, stupid sympathy. I’m certain he doesn’t deserve it after the things he’s done to me, but his words put a knot in my stomach. Even though I know he doesn’t deserve it, I hug him. Because I want to, and I understand. Everyone wants to feel chosen, and I can certainly see why he makes that absolutely impossible. There are plenty of ways he’s appealing, but plenty more ways he’s extremely problematic. He stands in his own way. His baggage is heavier and more difficult than most, but mine’s a lot lighter, and I suppose I haven’t found that, either.
“My first boyfriend, I loved him with everything I had and then some. I was 17 and he was my first love, but I wasn’t his. He was a nightmare, honestly. Even calling him a boyfriend was a joke, he just used me over and over again because I let him. I think some part of me knew it even then. I may have played the fool, but I wasn’t one. And no matter how much I gave, it was never enough. He was a black hole, sucking up every bit of my energy and my happiness, but never giving anything back, and a sane girl would have gotten fed up with that. She would’ve left.”
“You didn’t.”
I shake my head. “Nope. Stayed until he’d sucked me completely dry. He left me for someone else.” I glance up at him. “Not one of my proudest moments.”
He shrugs lightly, not judging me for my youthful mistakes.
“And you’d think it would have been a relief. He sucked so much out of me, it probably saved my life that he finally cut me loose. I’m not even exaggerating. Loving him sent me into some really dark places, and I went to even darker places afterward because…” I swallow, unsure how deep into this I want to get. “Worse things happened in my quest to obliterate that pain. But I wasn’t relieved. I didn’t want to be set free. I wanted to spend the rest of my life in that dysfunctional prison with him.” I look up and meet his gaze. “Why would anyone ever want a thing like that? But I was convinced I could never love anyone else. It was him or nothing. There was no love for me if it wasn’t his, which was all the more ridiculous because he obviously never loved me.”
“He sounds like an idiot.”
I crack a tiny smile. “Yeah. He was. But so was I. It’s an unkind thing to say about myself, but I couldn’t have been more wrong about pretty much everything. Maybe I haven’t found what I’m looking for yet, but I’ve built a nice life for myself. A life I never could have had with him. A better life than his, too. I shouldn’t admit this, but I tend to check out ghosts from my past on social media to see how their lives turned out. His is bad. He knocked up that girl he left me for and they’ve had this ridiculous on-again-off-again relationship, the kind where you could see either of them impulsively pulling a loaded gun and killing the other at any given time. Just drama and dysfunction and toxicity. I guess he didn’t outgrow it. But I did, thankfully. I won’t say I’ve always made the best relationship decisions, but I’ve never let anyone treat me that way again even though I really hate to lose people. I’m not one of those easy breezy people capable of effortlessly letting go. Even Jackson, I never loved him, but he was still able to… lure me into that situation,” I say, looking down, since it’s too sordid to look at his face when I’m talking about that night.
Calvin grabs my jaw and forces me to look back at him. “You have a good heart. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“It makes me dumb sometimes,” I say lightly, turning my head to break his grip.
He allows it, but I still feel his gaze on me when I look away. “What worse things happened?”
My blood freezes, and my stomach does a somersault. “Hm?”
“You said worse things happened when you tried to distract yourself from the heartbreak. You went to darker places.”
“I’d rather not talk about it,” I say honestly. “I’m tired, aren’t you?”
His lips tug up faintly. “All right, you obviously don’t want to talk about that.”
“I’m just tired,” I state, pulling away from him since he’s a human space heater. Or maybe it was the memory, I don’t know.
He allows me to move over into the spot next to his, but I don’t move far. I stay closer to the middle of the king sized bed than over on my own side. “What doyouwant?”
I roll on my side and slide my arm up under the cool underside of the pillow so I can get ready for sleep. “In general, or…?”
“When you were talking about the first boyfriend, you said you haven’t found what you’re looking for yet. What are you looking for?”
It’s a hard question. I know the answer, but I don’t want to read off unchecked boxes from some imaginary list. “I want to be loved, completely. I want someone as committed to me as I am to them. I want a man who truly knows who he is, what he wants. I don’t want to build a life that’s going to fall apart, so I need someone who knows what he’s doing, who will build along with me and be just as invested in the success of our joint venture as I am.”
He regards me with a look I might consider fondness if I didn’t know the story of our relationship. “That seems pretty reasonable.”
“You’d think. Everyone wants to fuck around and have easy, shallow relationships that they bail out of as soon as the excitement fades. Nobody wants to dig deep and really invest in a single person.”
“That’s not true,” he says. “Look how much I’ve invested in you already, and I intend to invest much more.”
I roll my eyes. “I’m sorry, I should have been more specific. I want all that from a man who isn’t a rapey blackmailer who is effectively holding me prisoner.”
“Ah.” He nods as if that makes sense. “See, that’s where you went wrong. You told the universe what you wanted, but you weren’t specific enough. Now you’re stuck with me.”
I crack a smile. “Only until you get bored.”
His dark gaze moves over my face, then lowers to my bare breasts and the shape of my body beneath the blanket. “If I were you, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.”
