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The most beautiful child I’d ever seen stared out at me from the small screen. I studied him. Large, dark, luminous eyes and a joyful smile graced his tiny round face. Dimpled hands held tightly to a purple elephant, and wild curly hair topped his little head.
I touched his face through the screen and swallowed my sorrow. “He’s beautiful, Van.”
“I should have had him with you.” He muttered rawly.
The sound pierced my heart. I looked up from his phone to see his face pained, his gaze stark.
I answered softly, offering comfort. “But then he wouldn’t be him. Don’t wish him away.”
He looked away, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat as he cleared it.
I sighed. I’d hurt him. I swallowed hard. An explanation was long overdue.
“I have agoraphobia.”
His face blanked at the sudden change in conversation, then he swung his gaze back to my face. He suddenly looked pissed.
“What?” He bit out.
I took a deep breath and continued, watching him as I explained. “It’s why I couldn’t come to you. At first, I thought I had a heart condition, that I inherited a heart defect from my pappou.” His eyes opened incredulously as he struggled to absorb the new information.
I continued. “Every time I went to buy a plane ticket for the summer, I got these crazy symptoms. I honestly thought I was dying. Somehow, losing my grandfather and going out, especially anywhere near an airport, got connected in my brain. Later that year, the doctor diagnosed me with agoraphobia.” I forced out a laugh and joked. “At least I don’t have a heart condition!”
His face suffused with red. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He gritted through his teeth. “I would have moved heaven and earth to get to you.”
I leaned closer and almost hissed the question that had burned inside me for ten years. “Why didn’t you?”
We stared at each other, eyes skittering back and forth, assessing, reading, searching.
“I thought your feelings were different from mine.” He finally broke the silence, his breathing heavy as he struggled to accept a different version of what he’d known as reality.
“I told you how I felt,” I rebutted.
“Your words and your actions didn’t match. What was I supposed to think?”
I nodded. That was fair. It was also time for a little more truth. I soldiered on, softer now, wanting him to understand the depth of my feelings for him.
“I rarely date. I haven’t slept with a man since you. I have not moved on.”
He sat back hard in his chair and looked away from me. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and the muscles of his jaw flexed with the gritting of his teeth.
“For the past year, I’ve been in a battle for partial custody of my son. I can’t leave.” He turned back to face me.
The tiny ray of hope I’d been nursing dimmed to a shadow. I looked down into my lap. “I understand.”
I heard him take a deep breath, then looked up to see him with his glasses in one hand, his other hand rubbing over his handsome face. He put his glasses back on then turned to me, his voice grim.
“Will you give me this weekend, Ruby-mine?”
I swallowed. Did I really have a choice? When you’re starving, you don’t quibble over crumbs.
“Yes.”
He threw his napkin down on the table and signalled the waiter for our bill. “Let’s get out of here.”
I thought we’d head back to the hotel right away, but he drove instead to a quaint area of the old downtown. “I want to walk with you. I’ve dreamed of exploring with you.”
He held my hand as we strolled the cobbled streets. It got colder as the evening wore on, and we ducked in and out of stores, in part to shop and in part to escape the cold for a few minutes. We talked and laughed and held hands until the tension between us became too much for me to bear.
