Page 23 of Shopping for an Heir
“I could. But I’m not.”
He laughed. “You deserve the whole story.” The smile faded from his face.
“I deserve more than that.”
“Yes,” he said softly. “You do. And this time, I’ll be honorable. Ask away.”
“I just did. Why did you leave?”
The struggle played out on his face. He opened his mouth to answer.
The server appeared with tortilla chips and salsa.
“Saved,” he joked.
She gave him a hard stare. Every molecule of her body was on fire. She felt all the feelings all at once, as if time folded into every emotion across every second in this scene. Pushing her hair off her shoulders, she watched him. A sense of redemption filled her.
Did he feel a glimmer of atonement? That kiss last night said more than I’m sorry.
What would he actually say?
“Why did you leave?” she persisted.
“Because I was out of my mind.”
She picked up her purse and started to stand. He lunged, his hand gripping her wrist in a vise.
“Don’t go.”
“Then don’t lie.”
“Not lying. Starting to explain. Give me a chance here, Suz. This isn’t easy.”
“You think it is for me?” Her heart relocated to her wrist.
“No.” He let go, his eyes desperate, animal-like in the way they worked the room. Alighting on her, he stared at her with so much heat and lust she almost burst into flames. “But now that you’re here, in front of me, and that line’s been crossed, I can’t go back. That doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing.”
“The Gerald Wright I knew ten years ago always knew what he was doing.”
“I’m not that man anymore. Probably never was.”
She sat down, gravity dragging her, the shock of his words leaving her boneless.
“I don’t believe that.”
“Believe whatever you want. Maybe after I explain, you’ll see it my way.” He took a sip of water. The skin at the hollow of his neck was bright red, a telltale sign of stress in him.
“Okay.” She reached for a tortilla chip just to do something with her hands. “Explain.”
“After the suicide bomber, I couldn’t think.” No need for clarity on this topic; Suzanne knew exactly who and what he was talking about. Three months before he dumped her, Gerald’s team had come across a suicide bomber, a guy wearing a vest of explosives. The team of five American soldiers had found him standing in the market. A sharp-eyed kid from Indiana, just off the plane, spotted the guy.
Carrying his toddler son in his arms, screaming about glory.
Split second decisions come with costs.
Gerald’s team had tried to find a way to disarm the guy and separate the child from him. The vest had detonated just as another child of about five or so had flung himself in the bomber’s arms.
It had ended badly.
“You did everything—”
Gerald’s palm shot up.
“This isn’t about that. It’s about what happened after.”
“I remember.”
“You don’t, Suz. You really don’t.”
Her throat tightened, a lump poking her, making tears push against her eyelids. “Then tell me. Please.”
“I am.” He paused. “It takes time.”
“We’ve had ten years.”
“Might not be long enough.” The stark look he gave her was heartbreaking.
“I won’t push.”
He smiled halfway. “You are constitutionally incapable of not pushing.”
“Is that why you broke up with me the way you did? Because you knew I’d push.”
Slowly, achingly, he looked up from the table, meeting her eyes.
“Yes.”
“Damn it.”
“I knew if I saw you I couldn’t leave. That I’d drag you down.”
“Why? Why did you leave?”
“Because I was out of my mind, Suz. I ended up in long-term therapy back home. Took two years for the nightmares to stop.”
“I would have been there with you, through it all.”
“I know you would have. That’s why I had to let you go.”
“Don’t play this macho bullshit with me, Gerald. You’re better than this. And I damn well know I am. Don’t feed me lines like this.”
“I’m not. I’m telling the truth.”
“The whole truth?”
His face flickered with admiration and disgust, a strange combination that Suzanne found oddly titillating.
“It must suck to live life with that perfect bullshit detector. What a curse.”
He might as well have slapped her and caressed her at the same time. This was what she missed the most. A man who could slip into shorthand with her, who understood her at a fundamentally different level than the rest of the world. The rarity of that kind of connection made her watch him, breathing through a decade of scar tissue, and realize that the past didn’t matter.
Truly.
How much longer was she going to deprive herself of being this well understood? Her anger was a shield against the injustice of what Gerald had done to her, but it was also a shell she used to justify hiding from the world. Three years of law school, seven years of hundred-hour weeks left her with virtually nothing to give to any sector of her life.
Least of all her heart.
She liked it that way.
Until now.
“It’s a gift.”
He snorted. “It’s a gift when it helps you. I don’t think it’s helping you right now.”
Damn it.
He did it again.
“How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Know me so well? Even after all these years you just...do.”
“It’s a gift.” He didn’t smirk as he threw her own words back at her.
“It really is.”
She started to breathe as slowly as possible as her heart crawled into her throat, her stomach curling inward, her thighs tightening. He could just look at her and make this happen. He could give her a raw, unafraid appraisal and rip out the deep roots of discontent that had grown there in his absence.
She grabbed a tortilla chip and shoveled it in her mouth, the crunching a welcome static, breaking up the silence in her mind.
Gerald did that.
He quieted her, the internal voice silenced, the eerie echo leaving room for true emotion to seep in.
For him to walk back in.
“That’s it? You had PTSD like every other soldier—including me—and you left because of that?”
“Basically.”
“Basically doesn’t cut it.”
“I came home and spent nearly two months in a psych ward, Suz. That email was a gesture of mercy. Took me two years to get out of my own head and start living again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t need your pity.”
“I’m not offering it. The fact that you don’t know the difference between pity and empathy is really sad.”
He gagged on his water.
“Your walking out on me was the single worst thing that ever happened to me, Gerald. Ever.”
Eyes watering, he tried to recover and speak, his throat in spasms. “I’m sure that’s not true, Suz. You saw some roadside bombings that—”
“Don’t you dare—you, of all people—try to tell me my own internal state, Gerald. You don’t get to invalidate me. You don’t get to rank my emotional devastation.” Her voice was deadly calm. “You never had permission to do so, and you certainly don’t have it now.”
Pain flashed in his eyes. “You’re right. Forgive me.”
Forgive me.
Could she? Could she ever? As the waiter delivered a platter of enchiladas and quesadillas and they busied themselves, grateful for the break, she wondered. Could she ever forgive him? Or herself? Because if the answer was no, she was wasting time.
Hers and his.
“I’ve imagined this moment so many times,” she confessed. Why not? What did she have to lose. Worst case, her anger. It might be nice to set down that burden for good and stop letting it weight her down. “And not once did I think that when I explained how hurt I was by your leaving, you’d compare it to a roadside bombing and say that having the love of my life break my heart by email and then disappear wasn’t as bad.”
He closed his eyes and winced.
“And yet, every part of me wants to throw myself at you and be kissed like last night. I want to pour out my heart and pick that fine mind of yours. I want to watch you sculpt, observe how you move through the world with your body, taking in parts of life I only see at surface depth. So here I am, hating you and left with the echo of loving you so deeply, and for so long, that I think I held on to the anger because it was all I had left of you.”
With that, she grabbed a triangle of quesadilla, dipped it in sour cream, and took a bite.
Gerald’s eyes tightened, narrowing so much she could barely see the pupils. He leaned forward, his cuff brushing the tips of the chips in the basket, and whispered, “The biggest mistake of my life was not knowing how to trust you.”
She felt the words as they traveled from her brain to her heart, triggering biochemical systems designed to unite emotion with stimulus, biology with communication.
“And sitting here, across this table, watching you tell me how much I hurt you, and yet you still want what we once had, blows my mind. You always did that, Suzanne. And you still do that. Only you.”
A part of her knew he was holding back. There was more. Much more.
