Page 148 of Reckless
Maybe not because he didn’t love me.
I could not be the woman who disappeared inside that and called it enough because it was prettier than loneliness.
I couldn’t.
Xerses looked at me like he was trying to hold both truths at once, that I still wanted him and that I was still leaving.
That was love too, maybe.The ugliest version of it.When neither body nor feeling could solve what language had broken.
“I would never want you to hate yourself for loving me,” he said.
That was the line that finally made the first tear hit.My cheeks were wet.Fuck.
I laughed once and wiped it away so fast it almost felt angry.
“Then please don’t make this harder.”
He halted.
“I’m not trying to make it harder.”
“I know.”My voice shook despite my best efforts.“That’s what’s so awful about this.”
He was making it harder because he loved me enough to want another chance before he knew how to become what I needed.
That was a beautiful impulse.
It was not enough.
I pressed my lips together until I could trust them again.
Then I gave him the plain truth, because if I did not, I might still break and go back.
“I wanted to be the woman a man was proud to have beside him,” I said.“Because he saw me as his partner.”
The word sat there.
He looked at me and for the first time all night, he had nothing ready.
He had offered care and security and permanence, but from above from the side and from the position of the man deciding what the future should look like and bringing it to me finished.Not beside me with empty hands saying choose it with me.
The difference was everything.
The hostess looked our way once, then quickly away.
I put my bag higher on my shoulder.
“I wish this had been easy,” I admitted.
The truth of it sat raw in my throat.“I wish we were the kind of people who could just love each other and not have the rest matter.I wish all of this worked the way movies pretend it does.”I laughed softly, brokenly.“I wish one grand realization and one great night meant the hard part was over.”
His eyes never left my face.
I turned to him one final time and took in the whole of him as if I could store it and survive on memory later.
The man I loved.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
