Page 11 of Dirty Sweet Valentine
But I’m also exhausted. It feels like this night has been coming for years, feels like I should have been more prepared, but I’m not. The toll is both physical and emotional, and trying to keep up is taking more stamina than I have.
My feet drop off the couch and my legs hang limply at his sides as I gulp in deep breaths in an attempt to recover. Harrington doesn’t pull out of me, just presses his forehead against mine and drinks in the same air that I do. I place my palm over the left side of his chest and mentally count his heartbeats as they gradually slow. This heart...it used to belong to me. Does it still?
It’s a stupid flicker of doubt. I don’t have to ask to know it does, that it always will. The same way mine will always belong to him. No matter the time, no matter the distance.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” I say when I can speak again. “Shouldn’t have told you to go without a condom.” It’s an easier topic than any other, and that’s saying something.
“Are you not on birth control?” He doesn’t sound concerned.
“No, I am. And I always use a condom. But I don’t know you well enough anymore.” God, that hurts to say, and I’m not sure that it’s entirely true. I don’t want to change the tone of what we just shared with accusations. “I don’t know what your sex habits are,” I amend.
He pulls back and tilts my chin up so I’m forced to look him in the eyes. “I’ve only ever gone bare with you.”
I knew he wouldn’t have remained celibate over all these years, but this declaration feels very nearly like the same thing. “Why?” I ask, even though I know the answer.
“Because I don’t love anyone but you,” he says simply.
A sob catches in my throat, and I have to take two deep breaths before I’m able to say anything. “This hurts, you know? It doesn’t make anything better. It just hurts.”
He sighs. With his hand clapped at my neck, he rubs my jaw with his thumb. “I wasn’t going to say anything.” He swallows. “That’s a lie—I was always going to say this, but I wish that I weren’t. I wish that I were strong enough to walk away again, let you live this incredible life you’ve built for yourself, but I just...I just can’t.”
My heart trips in my chest. Hope bubbles up from the hidden place it’s always hidden. “I don’t want you strong enough to walk away again. I don’t want you strong enough to crawl. I want you here. Is that an option?”
“Not exactly. But the reason I’m in London was because I was offered a promotion. Team leader, of sorts. I haven’t accepted it yet, but if I do, I’ll no longer be in the field. I’d be in the office, running everything. It means I wouldn’t have to be anonymous anymore. I wouldn’t be undercover. I could have a life. I could have a life with you.”
My pulse races, but I refuse to run with it until I know for sure. “Here? You’d be here?” His long pause lets me know already that it isn’t the answer I want.
“I’m afraid not. Mumbai.”
India. He’s asking me to go with him to India. My throat is tight and my stomach feels heavy. India is another world, one so far removed from my current life that I can’t even imagine what ours could look like there.
“It’s too much to ask, I know. I shouldn’t—”
I cut him off. “Don’t take it back. Just, could we maybe discuss it without you inside of me?”
“Of course.” He kisses my forehead as he pulls out, as though that might calm the throb of emptiness I feel with him gone. He puts himself away, and takes a step back.
I hop off the sofa and rub the back of my neck as I pace away from him. This is a big thing he’s landed me with. An incredible thing, and some free and whimsical part of me wishes it didn’t require any consideration, wishes I’d just say yes like I want to and be done with it, but that part of me is small and foreign. I’m not free or whimsical, as a rule. I’m serious and bullheaded. I take risks, but they’re practical risks. I’m a tree that’s been planted, maybe not where I wanted to be planted, but my roots are deep nonetheless.
I’m not, as much as I wish I was, the same woman he walked away from fifteen years ago.
I circle around the sofa before looking back at him. “Is it safe? You’d said before that any connections you had were liabilities. That they could become targets. Is this different now?”
“It’s not as safe as if you were marrying a barrister or a grocer, but, yes, it would be different. A lot of the men and women at this level have spouses. Have families even. It’s as close to a nine-to-five position as there is in this business.”
“It’s a desk job,” I say, finally understanding.
“Essentially.”
It sounds wonderfully ideal—for me. Not so much for him. “Do you want to accept it? Would you even like a desk job?”
“I would.” His tone is uncertain, and he knows it. “I would for you,” he says more sure. “I would love any life with you.”
I start to nod my head, because I would love any life with him too. But then I pause because that’s not true. I don’t want a life with him if he has to give up everything else he loves to get it. That was the whole reason I’d been able to let him walk away the first time—because he loved his job. He loved it as much as he’d loved me.
Years have gone by, but if he still loves me like I know he does, I can’t imagine he doesn’t still love his job too. And if I am the one to make this choice for him, a piece of him may always long for the love he left behind. Just as it must now, the other way around. It’s an impossible choice.
“What happens if you don’t accept the job? Do you go back in the field?”
“Yes,” he answers simply. Succinctly.
Before I can say anything else, he crosses deliberately to me. “Don’t answer now,” he says, taking my hands in his. “We have all night together. Let’s not think about this at all. I want to be in the moment with you while we have it.”
He kisses me, less greedily than before. It’s unhurried and thorough. It’s passionate, still, and within short minutes, we’re on the floor in front of the fireplace. Leisurely, we strip of our clothes, our eyes studying each other with intense interest. I have every centimeter of his landscape memorized, and my fingers and tongue are determined to relearn every inch, mapping the changes since they last explored this land. I take my time, and it’s a lengthy survey, almost as long as the expedition his hands take across my own skin.
It feels like hours later when he’s stretching over me and pushing inside. We make love slowly, lingering in every stroke, as though we don’t have mere hours before morning. As though we have all the time in the world.
I wake before Harry does the next morning. The shadows are still heavy, the first streaks of sunrise not yet on the horizon. I reach for my phone to check the time. My alarm is due to sound in twenty minutes, but I turn it off, knowing that even though I’ve o
nly slept for a couple of hours, I won’t fall back asleep. There’s too many jumbled-up thoughts in my head pressing to be sorted. While I was able to brush them aside last night, I can’t any longer. There isn’t time.
I first try to think about me, about what he’s asking me to give up. I don’t have a lot of friends, but there are a handful that I’d miss. I’m an only child and my parents are divorced. Could I leave Maman and move to a foreign country without her? Could I give up my job, my career—a career I’ve slaved over, a job that I’m damn good at—for a man I don’t really know anymore?
But how can I let him walk away instead?
Instead of finding answers for the future, my mind wanders back to the past. For a long while after he first left, I replayed every detail of our time together on a daily basis. Eventually it became paralyzing. It was too hard to move on when I was stuck in the memory of him, and so I made an intentional effort not to think about it and invest that energy in my career.
It’s been a long time since I’ve retraced these memories, and now that I’ve opened the dam, they flood over me in a rush.
I’d been just twenty-six when we’d met. It had happened quite by accident, neither of us actually looking for anyone. I’d been wrapped up in advancing my career at the Creative Advertising Agency. After three years on the job, I was still a newbie and the only woman on the sales team, which meant I had to work twice as hard to prove myself. I didn’t have the time or energy for anything more than one-night stands and pub flings.
Which was why Harrington was not supposed to last. He was, initially, just a bloke I met at a concert of some no-name band. We’d gone to my place—I still brought men home back then—and had crazy monkey sex all night long. We fell asleep so he stayed the night, and the next morning we woke up to a burst pipe in my building. My entire flat was covered with three inches of water. The tenant manager quickly stepped in to handle the damages, but the cleanup was going to take at least a week, as it had affected several units. There would be no water in the meantime.
