“Very funny.” He grabbed my wrist and we grappled for a moment, his eyes lighting up as I struggled and failed to get my arm back. My heart started to race as I realized the last time he had my wrist circled like this he was probably fucking me. I froze. Glancing at my arm, he noticed the tattoo I had running from my inner wrist toward my elbow, a quote from a book I’d loved as a child. “Nice. Is it new?”
“No, not really. I got that one in Paris.” Our eyes met as unspoken history flowed between us.
“What does it say?” He studied the French script.
“It says, ‘Here is my secret. It is very simple: one only sees clearly with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.’ It’s from The Little Prince.”
Nick looked at the tattoo again, so tenderly that for a second I was terrified he would kiss it and I’d be lost. But he didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“For everything.”
Slowly he brushed his thumb over those words, and the entire room seemed to go still, the air compressing all around me. It was the barest of caresses, but it sent a powerful wave of longing through my body, and called up other memories of his hands running over sensitive skin. He’s got to stop touching me. I can’t take it.
I sat back in my chair, grateful he allowed me to reclaim my arm. When I spoke, my voice was strained. “No problem. Like I said, I forgive you.”
A pause, and then he sat back as well. “Aren’t you going to apologize too?”
I shrank from him. “Am I going to apologize? For what?”
“For divorcing me so fast. You didn’t even let me explain my decision to leave that night.”
“Why should I? It was obvious—you didn’t love me enough to stay.” Saying it out loud before he did was important.
He shook his head. “That wasn’t it at all, Coco. I was crazy about you. Believe it or not, I had what I thought at the time was a pretty good reason.”
I continued to gape at him. “Nick, you can’t be serious. That decision defied explanation. No reason was good enough to leave me there like that, especially if you loved me.”
“You’re not even going to let me tell you what it was now? After all this time?”
I hesitated, wondering at both his reason for wanting to offer an explanation at this point and at my reluctance to hear it. “What’s the point?”
He shrugged. “It will make me feel better. Wouldn’t it make you feel better?”
That was actually a good question. Would it make me feel better to hear his “pretty good reason” for leaving me that way? What if it was a lame excuse and I just ended up hating him again? Or—and this could be worse—what if I found his reason decent enough to understand? What if I could be persuaded to see things from his point of view? What if I fell for him all over again?
No. Just… No. It was bad enough that I was still so attracted to him. I didn’t want to revisit the past, reconsider our actions. No matter what our reasons were for any of the decisions we’d made back then, we’d moved on. I’d moved on. We could be friends going forward, perhaps, but no good would come of going back. Too much damage had been done, too much time had passed, and too much effort had been put into forgetting him. Forgetting the forever he’d promised me. I couldn’t live through it again.
“I don’t think so,” I said slowly. “If it’s OK with you, I’d like to leave the past where it belongs, let bygones be bygones and all that. Start over as friends.”
“Friends, huh?” His mouth hooked up. “You think we can be friends?”
“I think we can certainly try.” A note of false hope crept into my voice. “You know, we’ve never really been friends. We jumped right into a relationship practically the day we met.”
“True. We did.” He grinned, looking sheepish and charming, just the way he had the day he’d followed me into History 140. It was the second week of classes, and he’d caught my eye as we entered the lecture hall together, my pulse racing when he slid into the row in front of me. How had I not noticed him before? He’d brought nothing to class with him—not a backpack, not a laptop, not even a pencil. But he was so adorable with those big brown eyes and long, thick lashes and that beautiful mouth, I didn’t mind when he kept turning around.
Hey. I’m Nick.
Can I borrow a piece of paper? Do you have an extra pen?
Somehow I managed to focus and get through the lecture, but I spent a good amount of time staring at the back of his head and texting Mia that the hottest guy I’d ever seen in my life was sitting right in front of me in Western Civ, and I really, really, really wanted to lick his neck.
When class was over, he stood up and handed me back the pen and piece of paper. “Here you go.
Thanks.”
Confused, I stared at the paper, which was folded in half.
“Don’t you need this? I mean, doesn’t it have your notes on it?”
He shook his head. “Nah, I didn’t take any notes.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. I’m not even in this class.”
“Then what are you—”
“I saw you walking across campus and followed you in here. I wrote my number down on that piece of paper.”
My mouth falling open in disbelief, I unfolded the paper and read the phone number written there before looking at him again. Students streamed by us, but everything beyond his face was a blur. “You sat through a two-hour lecture on the Reformation just to give me your number?”