The thought of that twists my insides into a bundle, but I have to hold firm. “Not even to my office?”
“You installed a lock.” He raises a brow.
“Yes,” I say, reaching inside and grabbing my keys and a jacket. “I did.”
He waits as I lock the door, his proximity messing with my head. I can feel his energy swirling around me, teasing me, luring me in like the tempo of a Marvin Gaye song.
I start down the sidewalk but shoot him a look when I sense his hand nearing the small of my back. As badly as I want that contact, I know I can’t have it. Boundaries and all that.
He does open the door and I let him, climbing in and settling into the seat. I grin as he nearly runs around the front and jumps in, pulling the car onto the street as if I might change my mind before he gets us gone.
“I want to tell you I only came with you because I’m weak,” I say, looking straight ahead. “I won’t always be weak, but I will always hold it against you for doing this to me.”
“Doing what to you?”
“This.” I look at him out of the corner of my eye. “I’m taking some of this blame. I knew this wouldn’t end well. But I do feel like you pursued me, knowing I would fall in love with you and you would break my heart. So, at the end of the day, you, Lance Gibson, are a cocksucker.”
One hand releases the wheel, resting on the console between us as he laughs. “I’m happy to know how you feel.”
“Yup.”
“I am, in fact, a bigger cocksucker than you know.” The laugh falls from his voice, his hand going back to the wheel. He takes a turn at Carlson’s towards Goodman’s Gas Station as my heart falls to my feet.
This is going to be bad, worse than I thought. Not that I knew what to expect. I honestly didn’t think about it enough.
Damn it, Mariah.
“Why don’t you take me home?” I ask. “This conversation isn’t necessary if that’s what you have to tell me.”
He turns the opposite way of my house, heading towards Bluebird.
“I dated a girl once,” he says, his eyes trained out the windshield. “She—”
“I don’t want to hear about your app girls.” I grip the door handle to steady myself. I’m weak to him, even though I don’t feel it, and I’ll be damned if I sit here and listen to him talk about some girl I’ve already decided I hate.
I think he’s going to smile, but he doesn’t. “She’s not an app girl.”
He looks at me, the emotion in his irises bombing my soul. It shreds me, rips me apart, and I don’t even know what it’s about. My heart just hurts for him because I know he’s hurting and I’m pissed at myself for that, but what can I do?
I love him.
“I’ve been with two girls who weren’t app girls in my life,” he says, his voice barely audible over the roar of the engine. “One was the reason I started using apps, the other was the reason I quit.”
My breath stalls in my chest, the burn from not breathing only acceptable because I’m not thinking about it.
The other was the reason I quit …
“It’s not fair to do this to me,” I say on an exhale. “Do you hate me? Is that why you won’t just leave me alone?”
The car slows down as we hit a gravel road, the sun filtering through the trees. It’s gorgeous here, a lake to our right and a cow pasture to our left. We ride a few minutes in silence as I fight tears.
I won’t look at him. If this is what he’s doing, he doesn’t deserve to see me cry. Then again, maybe it would be good for him to see my pain.
“See that hill over there?” he asks, bringing the car to a crawl. He points to the other side of the lake. “This road used to go right through there. That lake was really two lakes until a few years ago. We had a flood and they joined, the road went underwater, and they never separated.”
“I didn’t even know that could happen,” I offer.
“One night, when I was younger,” he gulps, clearly fighting with the words to this story, “I was out here screwing around with a friend. We’d been to this campfire at a barn out that way and were racing to see who could get to town first.”
The car stops along the side of the road. He turns the top of his body to me, but his eyes are glued to the hill.
I look from where he’s looking and back to him. “What happened?”
“I was going too fast. My tires hit the gravel the wrong way and I caught air.” He cringes, balling one hand in a fist. “It rolled, almost going into the water right down there.” He points again to a little spot dotted with tall grasses.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” I gasp.
He nods, forcing a swallow. “I am. It’s one of those blessings Mom used to talk about. Out of a really ugly situation came one positive. I survived.”
Reaching out, not sure who needs the contact more, I place my hand on his arm. I feel him relax beneath my touch, but he doesn’t say a word about it.
Instead, he takes a deep breath. “I ... um .. I was dating a girl then. Britt was her name. And she broke up with me right after that.”
“Good for you,” I tell him. “She sounds like a jerk.”
The car fills with a silence that comes right before a shoe drops. The air is heavy, pregnant, even, and I can barely breathe through the weight of it all.
I drop my hand as he puts the car in park and flips off the ignition. I consider getting out and walking back to town because I’m not sure if I want to hear whatever it is he’s going to say.
“Lance—”
“A couple more minutes. Please,” he chokes out. He waits for me to indicate my willingness to hear him out before continuing. “You don’t deserve to think that me telling you this won’t work out between us has anything to do with you.”
“Lance, stop it.”
“I should’ve been completely honest with you. I thought … I thought I was protecting us both by just walking away. I’d keep you from having to make a hard choice and me from having to hurt my ego a little.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask, my heart threatening to beat so hard it sends me into cardiac arrest. The uncertainty about where he’s going with this is killing me and my hand is on the door to get out of the car. It feels too cramped in here, too small, not nearly big enough for whatever this bomb is that’s going to fall.
“Britt left me because I couldn’t meet the conditions she had for her life. She, like you,” he says, eyeing me carefully, “wanted the entire thing—marriage, a little house … a family.”
“I don’t understand …”
The gorgeous green eyes I love blur with unshed tears. It causes mine to react the same way, even though I don’t know why.
I grab his hand, holding it in my own, even though I shouldn’t. Even though I know better than to get any more tangled up with this man who’s already broken my heart once.
“Mariah …” He looks at me completely unguarded. Completely broken. “I can’t have kids.”
I feel myself flinch, hear the rush of a swallow drop into my stomach. “What?”
“The accident fucked me up.” He hesitates. “I’m sterile.”
Sterile.
I sort through my mental dictionary and make sure I’m not confusing that word with another. This is not a word you mistake and react to incorrectly.
As it dawns on me what he’s saying, his features smoothen into an emotionless mask, it breaks my heart. This is why he lied to me by omission.
“Oh, Lance,” I say, the words bound up together as I force them by my lips.
He works a finger around the inside corner of his eye and then around his nose. He sniffles, like he’s just clearing out his nostrils, but I hear the fear, the sadness.
I reach across the console, my arms going around his neck. Right or wrong, I can’t stop myself from hugging this beautiful, broken man as a tear slips down his cheek. He squeezes me so tight I can barely breathe, but I’m positive I don’t need air to survive right now. I just need him and for him to know I’m here.
We sit for a long time wrapped in each other’s arms. A truck goes by all too fast, rocking Lance’s car back and forth. We just sway along with it, unable, or unwilling, to pull apart.
With a kiss to the spot just below his earlobe, I finally lean back. My heart is so swollen it puts pressure on every other organ in my chest. Brushing a strand of hair off his forehead, I search his eyes.
“Fuck her,” I say, trying to get him to smile. “There are so many ways to build a family. Fuck her for not seeing that.”
His forehead creases as he now leans away from me. “I can’t blame anyone for wanting kids.”
“Then she didn’t love you.” I fall back into my seat, my eyes blinking back tears. This time, they’re for me.
I wouldn’t have left him after the accident. I wouldn’t have left him if it left him in a wheelchair and I had to take care of him every day for the rest of my life. Because even if that were my day, it would still be a day with him.
Tears slip down my cheeks, burning hot as they fall to my shirt.
Why can’t he love me as much as he loved her?
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “Now you see why I didn’t tell you.”
“Well, I’ll hate her for the rest of my life.” I dab my eyes with the neck line of my shirt. “She gets to walk away with your heart and—”
“Woah,” he says, shifting in his seat. “Hold up.”
“No. It doesn’t seem fair.”
He presses his lips together. “What doesn’t seem fair, Mariah?”
“That you still love her.” My words are woven in the emotion pouring from my heart, the tears flooding my lips as I try to speak. “That she gets to break your heart and …”
I stop talking when he starts laughing. It’s not one of his belly laughs like I’m ridiculous. It’s more like he’s in disbelief.