Page 108 of A Lick and A Promise
“And what do you want out of this, Knox?” I asked.
“I want you in my life,” he stated immediately and inflexibly.
My heart leapt to my throat with hope.
“We were friends before, babe. We can get there again,” he went on.
My heart shriveled to nothing.
Friends.
He wanted to be friends.
The fuck of it was, to keep things copacetic with our crew, neither of us had any choice.
We had to go back to being friends.
“What we had, Luna,” he said softly before I could share my thoughts, “it was fantastic. I’ll never remember it any other way. And you’re you. I can’t lose you. So I want you how I can have you, and that’s how I can have you.”
I thought what we had was fantastic too.
But it wasn’t.
It was just fantasy.
I knew this because, in the intervening time, he hadn’t thought on things and come to me to work it out. He hadn’t talked to Cap about how Cap didn’t really love Raye being an Angel, but it was a huge part of who Raye was, so he found a way to deal with it. He hadn’t talked to Eric, who had lived through some of the Rock Chick/Hot Bunch stuff, and had definitely been around for their decade plus of being married, happy, making babies and raising them. All of those men and women finding a way for everyone to be just who they were without someone demanding they excise a chunk of that to have their man.
No.
He'd come here knowing we were done and wanting to be friends.
“I want you in my life too, so I guess that’s where we’re going,” I mumbled.
He smiled, and this one was relieved. He then reached out to grab my hand.
His was bigger than mine. Stronger. He had calluses that felt good when they were scraping over my skin, but now, they were a form of torture as he stroked the palm of my hand with his thumb.
“We’ll work this out, Loon,” he whispered. “We mean too much to each other not to.”
“You’re right.”
And he was.
That was the kicker.
He’d find somebody, for sure, and I’d have to watch that shit.
I’d find somebody, maybe, and would he care?
A couple of weeks, he’d moved on.
It was over.
I was eating donuts with the man I loved but I’d never have.
“And we were right to make that time just ours,” he continued. “Now, no one knows, and no one needs to know.”
I wasn’t so sure about that.
