“Sure.” She plays with a lock of her hair. “I, um, went with Whitney over to Peaches to get dessert.”
“What’d you get?”
“Cheesecake.” She flips her gaze to mine, her baby blues filled with unease. “We were going to bring it back here and watch some show about the royals, but we ran into Coach Collins and the new guy the school board hired for soccer.”
His name alone creates a storm inside me. My hands ball into fists at my sides as I try to remind myself I can’t be jealous. She’s not mine. And that right there is the most frustrating part of this whole damn dilemma.
“What’d he want today, anyway?” I ask, unable to help myself.
She pops the key in the lock and swings the door open. “Just to see about the delivery of some books and manuals I ordered for the football program.”
“Oh.”
“Why?” She steps inside the house, taking her shoes off by the door.
“It just seemed like a lot of talk and laughter over football manuals.”
Her shoulders lift and fall. “He’s nice.”
There’s more to it than that but she’s not going to give it to me.
My body burns from the tension in my muscles as I watch her busy herself with a hundred things besides looking at me. Each tick of the clock that goes by reduces my frustration over the fucking coach and moves it more toward a hollow sensation that tells me something is wrong.
“Are you going to come in or not?” A look is cast over her shoulder, one that can only be defined as on guard.
Before I step inside, I rethink what Nora told me at Crave: how you only come across true love once in your life, the kind of love that sets your world on fire. Love that makes you happily lose yourself in the smoke because you’d rather die from the fumes than live without it.
That’s Mariah for me.
For the first time in my adult life, a relationship is not just about the sex. With her, it’s more than the conversations we have, or the way she looks at me, or the way she makes me want to consider what impact my actions have on the world. She doesn’t just make me want to be better for her. She makes me better in every way.
Nora said coming over here and breaking it off with her was the stupidest move I could make. She’s seen me do some seriously stupid shit too.
I agree. This is so fucking stupid. It’s stupid in the same way chemotherapy makes you sick but you have to undergo it to rid yourself of cancer. But, just like chemo, this is best choice I can make under the circumstances.
I cross the threshold and shut the door behind me. She stands in the little hallway that leads to the kitchen, the light illuminating her from behind.
There’s a suspicion, a leeriness to her gaze that seems so utterly unfair. It’s the most cutting thing I’ve felt in a very long time. I want to whisk her up into my arms and kiss the hell out of her. I want to tell her to stop looking at me like that. I want to tell her I’m standing here wondering what she would look like under the kitchen light at three in the morning when she comes down for a glass of water and I follow her because I can’t stand to be in bed without her. That I wonder what she’d look like in this position in the middle of the night prepping a bottle while I lie in bed with a baby awaiting her return. What she would look like coming in after a concert she’d always wanted to see.
All of this confession is on the tip of my tongue, ready to be screamed from the deepest recesses of my consciousness.
“How was your evening?” she asks, choosing each word with the care of a surgeon.
“Good. Helped Machlan and Peck fix Nana’s shed.”
She arches a brow. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
Exhaling a hasty breath, she turns away. Her hand plants on the refrigerator door. “What’s wrong, Lance?”
I take a step back. I’m not ready for this conversation. I thought I was in control, still figuring out how to bring it up, and I’m sure as hell not ready to go there yet. There was supposed to be time to figure this out first, to get a game plan, to maybe hold her one last time.
“Lance?” She turns on her heel and leans against the counter. “What’s the matter?”
“Why do you think something is the matter?”
Her arms cross her chest. “I don’t know what all of this is, but it’s not us.”
This is the opening I need, handed to me on a silver platter—one I’m trying to shove right back her way instead of just accepting.
My heart clenches as I read all the messages her eyes are telling me. “What is us, Mariah?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
Goddamnit.
Not yet.
I’m not ready.
“Can I ask you a question?” I ask, wrapping my hands around the posts of a chair.
“You just did.”
Cracking a smile, I can’t find it in my heart to fire back at her with some innuendo-filled response. “What do you want?”
“You mean like pizza?” she gulps.
“I know you like pizza.”
“And sushi,” she adds, her bottom lip starting to quiver.
“And tacos, right?”
She nods, sitting at the table with her hands in her lap. I don’t trust myself to move because I know exactly what I’ll do—It’ll end with her in my lap, putting off this conversation.
“I meant more like …” I think about how to phrase it. “What are the most important things you want out of life?”
Pretending I’m just waiting on her reply, I send her a silent plea that tells her to answer in a way I can feel good about. I want her to talk me out of this.
Her features soften, letting go of the fear that had crept into the lines of her face. She pulls her knees to her chest. “Night kisses,” she says just loud enough for me to hear.
I look at the ceiling as her words slice open a wound across my heart I’m certain will never heal.
“I don’t want anything fancy,” she says softly. “Loyalty from those I love. Feeling safe, like I don’t have to compete with anyone for anything.”
“You deserve all of that.”
“I think I do.” She puts her feet back on the floor as I look down at her. “What do you want, Lance?”
I pace a circle around her kitchen, my hands in my hair, tugging at the roots. I wish I could tell her what it is I really want.
Her.
Just her.
“I don’t know what I want,” I lie, unable to even look at her as I say it. My teeth clench, trying not to let the words by.
“I see.”
No, you don’t see!
Panic gathers in my core, melting everything in its path as it spreads through me like a virus. I pivot on my heel and look at my girl.
There’s a steeliness there. It’s cold and guarded and not at all the way she should look. I hate that I put it there. Me. I put that look of distrust on the woman I just want to protect and love and shower with kisses day and night.
I imagine the war that would be waged in those beautiful baby blues when she had to pick between the experience of a lifetime, of carrying a child, and of loving a man who is, by all accounts, unworthy of that love. The truth is, I know she loves me. Maybe even as much as I love her and the fact I’ve let this happen is heartbreaking.
She deserves so much more than me, a broken version of a teenage boy who’s gone to bed after eating everyone’s cookies.
“You know I don’t expect anything from you, right?” she asks.
“Mariah, wait …”
She gets to her feet, pushing in her chair. “Lance, it’s fine. I—”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” My chest rises and falls like I’ve ran a marathon, the air rushing out of my body in sharp, painful bursts. “It’s not you, Mariah.”
She smiles, but not at me. It’s directed inwardly, I think, like she predicted this.
I can predict too. I know she’d choose me over children. And my fear is too fucking deep that one day she’d turn forty and realize she’d given up something she could never get back just because I wrecked a car at eighteen and fucked up my life.
It’s unfair for someone’s tragedies to bleed onto another. I won’t do that to her, even if this kills me.
“Look,” I say, fighting the blaze in my ribs, “this isn’t about you.”
“It never is.” She shakes her head, turning away from me. “You’ve been kind and—”
“Mariah, stop it,” I say, barely able to utter the words past the lump in my throat.
“You don’t owe me an explanation. You don’t owe me an excuse.”
“It’s not an excuse.”
She pulls her hair to the top of her head, letting a tendril fall to her right temple. I want to tuck it behind her ear, kiss her just below the lobe, and feel her lean against me. But I can’t. Ever again.
“I think, um …” I say, clearing my throat. “I think things were getting too complicated.”
The stinging in my eyes appears for the first time since my parents funeral as I realize the death of my dreams. I’ve fought so hard never to find her, although I didn’t know she was the one I was trying to run from.
I’ve used dating apps, blown off calls, purposefully ended communication with women, done everything I could to never get to this point in a relationship. And here she sits, at the very apex without me ever having seen it coming. I was head over heels for this crazy girl before I even realized what love felt like. Now I have to break my own heart so that I won’t ever have to break hers.
God, I love you, I want to tell her. I’m so sorry it has to be this way.
“Yeah,” she says, her voice raw. “Complicated. That’s true.”
The air around us twists and turns, seeping through the entangled lies we’re both telling. She steps to the left. I step to the right. She looks at me. I look away. I look at her and she turns to the sink and becomes fascinated with a dishrag.