“I’m not hot.”
He gave me a smoldering look. “Are you sure about that?”
I reached for an orange one.
My kids had asked about Ben every single day since our “breakup.” That word… that whole idea… Breakup. It seemed so childish compared to what actually happened.
We didn’t break up. I ended things between us and set my world on fire, burning what little remained to cinders. I removed Ben from our life and watched my heart abandon me completely.
He had never been my boyfriend. Boyfriend was a word used for girls who had never been through what I had. For girls that still believed in love. For girls that still believed in happily ever afters.
I knew better.
Ben had been my savior.
Ben had been breath back in my lungs. Beats back in my heart. Blood back in my veins.
Ben had been found instead of lost. Home instead of wandering. Life instead of death.
And yet there was still too much between us… too much that kept us apart. I couldn’t just move on with him. I couldn’t expect my kids to move on. Ben wasn’t the answer to all of my problems. He might have eased the burden, but he didn’t take them away.
Dinner ended and I shooed the kids upstairs for their baths. They couldn’t go without giving Ben a hug first though. The sight of three of them clinging to his legs and waist twisted in my guts. Maybe the kids didn’t need to move on before they could accept Ben.
Maybe he had been right. Our heart just accepted new love by expanding, not by being exclusive.
Blake didn’t hug him or jump all over him, but he did walk over to ask when he was coming back.
“Do you need more help with math?” Ben didn’t even glance at me to see if I approved. I would have told him not to worry about it at all, but he wouldn’t look at me. He stared straight into Blake’s eyes and let my oldest answer on his own.
“Mom’s not very good at math,” Blake confessed.
“I do just fine,” I said to no one because no one was paying any attention to me.
“I’ll come back tomorrow, yeah?”
Blake’s mouth split into a big-toothed grin. “Yeah.” He held out his fist to Ben and they did this silly fist-bump thing they’d worked out over the summer.
“Alright, ducklings, up the stairs you go! Go brush the Popsicle off your teeth!” After a few more minutes of wrangling, they finally listened.
I moved toward the door to let Ben out. We were alone again after several hours of screaming kids and other things to occupy our attention. I didn’t know what to do with him except shove him out of my house.
“Thanks for helping Blake,” I told him. “We would have figured it out, but it was nice to have the extra hands.”
“Do you know what I keep thinking back to?” Ben asked seriously. I shook my head. I had no idea. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. “The time you tried to overpay for our dinner at Sullivan’s. The waitress kept trying to give you the change back and you kept trying to hand her more money. It all makes sense now. You can’t add.”
A surprise laugh bubbled out of me. “I can add! I was confused that night! They write their receipts weird there! And Blake’s homework is just insane. It’s like they expect fourth graders to have nothing better to do with their time than work on math problems. I didn’t learn that stuff when I was in school!”
“Don’t you have a masters in education?”
“Well, look at you. Successful lawyer and math genius. Congratulations on being awesome.”
“I miss you.” His words killed our laughter. Murdered it. My breath hitched in my chest and any coherent thought I had left disappeared.
“Ben…”
“I’m not going to apologize for coming over tonight.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“And I want to keep seeing your kids,” he pressed on. “And you. I’ve thought about this for months, Liz. I’ve thought about coming over here night after night. I’ve thought about what you said and the space you needed. But I’m tired of it, Babe. I’m so tired of it.”
“What are you saying?”
“I want to be a part of your life. However much you’ll let me. We were friends before we were anything else and if that’s all you’ll give me then so be it.”
My stomach fluttered, butterflies awakening from a dormant sleep. They stretched their wings in my belly and took flight, lifting their faces toward the sun for the first time in months. “You want to be friends?”
He laughed darkly, “No, Liz. I want to be so much more than friends. But if this is all I can have, then I’ll take it.”
“You should move on,” I pleaded with him. “You are such a great guy. There are so many girls out there that would love to be with a man like you.”
His jaw tensed and his eyes heated. “I don’t want to be with other girls, Liz. I want to be with you.” I opened my mouth to argue with him, but he held up his hand and stopped me. “Listen, I get that Grady was your first great love. I get that you had this incredible marriage with him and he was your soulmate. I understand that. And I would never want him to be anything else. Never. I have endless respect for him. For loving you the way that he did, for raising these amazing kids. I don’t know if I can ever live up to the legacy that he left behind. I don’t know if I want to. But Liz, he died. And you’re still alive. And there is so much left of your life to live. I want to live it with you. I want to be a part of everything that remains for you, good and bad. I want to be there for your kids, for your stressful days, for your amazing days, for all of your nights and for every moment in between. We tried the time apart, but we are better together. Both of us. Yes, Grady was your great love, but you are mine. And if you would let me, I would be yours too. There isn’t a limit on how much we can love, Liz. You had Grady. Now have me.”