Page 154 of Reckless
If I was going to choose her properly now, I had to tell her the truth without attaching anything to it.
I was parked under the same maple tree as the first morning I had gone to her place and made everything worse.
Interesting symmetry.
The building looked the same.Practical.Quiet.A place where real people went home and made dinners and watched trash television and lived lives that did not require four wings and yacht docks and silk rugs to feel important.
I got out of the car before I could think too hard about what I looked like.
Kelly came down six minutes later.
She wore shorts and a soft oversized sweater, hair up, face bare.No armor.No dinner gloss.No carefully chosen dress.She looked like herself stripped of performance, and because I had not seen her that way since the beach, the sight hit me low and immediate.
She stopped a few feet in front of me on the sidewalk.
I respected her enough not to step closer before she allowed it.“What are you doing here?”
I took a breath and let the truth sit in my mouth long to stop trying to improve it.“I’m not here to fix it.”
Her expression didn’t shift much.
“I’m not here to argue with your decision,” I continued.“I’m not here to ask for another chance because I had one and used it badly.And I’m not here with a gesture.”
I kept going before I lost the nerve.
“I’m here because I told you everything except the one thing that mattered most and then tried to build around saying it.”
Her eyes stayed locked on mine.
The street was quiet.A dog barked somewhere farther down the block.The late afternoon sun caught in the tops of the trees and turned the whole ordinary little road gold around the edges.
There had never been a less dramatic place to tell the truth.
“Kelly.”My voice roughened despite every effort at control.“I love you.”
Silence.No movement from her.Not even a blink.
I felt my own heartbeat everywhere.
I kept my hands at my sides.
“I loved you long before the beach,” I said.“I’ve sought you out since we met because there was something.”I exhaled slowly.“And after all that time I got to know you, and I was terrified of standing in front of you with only that.”
Her face moved then.
“I know I hurt you,” I said.“I know I reached for the one thing that made you feel purchased instead of chosen.I understand that now in a way I didn’t when I sat across from you in that room.”My throat tightened once around the next part.“And I also know that understanding it after the fact may not be enough.For you.For us.I know that.”
Kelly was looking at me like she had forgotten how to breathe.
I wanted to brush the hair off her shoulder, cup the side of her face, and feel whether the pulse in her throat was as wild as mine.But I did not move.
“I am okay if your answer is no,” I said.
That one hurt.I took a breath and met her gaze.“I’m not okay with leaving you without the truth because I was too proud or too practiced to speak plainly.”
That was the only honest thing left.
For a second, the whole world narrowed down to Kelly’s face.The tiny movement in her mouth.The wet brightness gathering in her eyes.The way her fingers curled once against her own palm and then went loose again.
