I reach to wipe away the stray tear tumbling down Melanie’s cheek. With downcast eyes, she offers me a weak smile at the gesture. I wish there was a way to get past this part so I could take away her pain, but I’m becoming an expert at dealing with the pain.
“Yes, I loved Alyssa. But she had to work hard to get me to see that she was a special woman. I may be a bastard for saying that, but it’s the truth.” I tip her chin up with the tip of my finger, needing to see her eyes as I lay my trump card out. “But you, I knew there was something about you from the moment we met. You were dangerous to me because I didn’t want to fall in love. And when I did, I knew I couldn’t fight it. I think that’s why I worked so hard to put the emphasis of what we shared on the kinkier aspects, because it made it so I didn’t have to admit how scared I was that you would leave me someday.”
I curl my fingers around the back of her neck, noting her sharp inhale at my touch. The first brush of my lips against hers is tentative. She jerks slightly before relaxing into the embrace, allowing me to capture her lips with a ravenous hunger. My tongue plunges between Melanie’s lips, devouring her as my hands work to remove the elastic from her hair.
Just as I’m about to shift my body so I can lay her out on the grass and worship her body, I feel two delicate hands pressing into my chest. “Xavier, we can’t do this,” she sighs, her voice trembling with emotion. “We need to finish talking.”
“I thought we had,” I protest. As far as I’m concerned, the only way to prove my feelings for her is to show her what I’m feeling, so there’s really no point in continuing this cyclical conversation. I can already say with certainty how it’s going to go; she’s going to ask why I didn’t try harder, I’m going to explain myself, she’s going to loop back to being second best, I’ll reassure her, and so on. There’s no need for any of that when there’s a growing bulge behind my zipper begging for me to finally make love to Melanie the way she deserves. Slow and tender, refusing to rush no matter how much both of us want to reach that pinnacle.
I stroke the bare skin of Melanie’s thighs, slowly working my way higher, beneath the hem of her dress. For a split second, I’m nearly certain she’s on board, until I feel her body jolt away from mine. She’s standing before I can reach for her, pacing back and forth along the waterfront.
“I can’t let you do this to me again, Xavier,” she pleads. Her arms wrap tightly around her middle protectively. “I can’t allow you to make me buy into the fairy tale, only to have you walk away again. There’s too much on the line this time. You want me to be a mother to Jacob? Fine, this is me doing exactly that. I need to figure out how in the hell I can protect not only myself, but also Jacob. If we screw this up again, he’s going to be the biggest loser in the deal. How can I be sure none of us comes out the other side worse than we are now?”
She starts to walk down the path toward the parking garage, leaving me no choice but to follow her. How in the hell did tonight go from being this amazing date with the woman I love to such a clusterfuck?
“Melanie, you can’t run away from me again,” I scold, my booming voice slicing through the night air.
She whips around to face me and the icy glare I see, even in the darkness, warns me that I’ve gone too far. “You know what, Xavier, fuck you!” she screams, closing the distance between us. When her body is only inches from mine, she pokes her finger sharply into my chest, causing me to wince. “I didn’t run away from you the last time. You sent me away. You left me sitting in our living room, stripped bare both physically and emotionally, after telling me that you couldn’t trust me. And now, you expect me to ride off into the sunset with you like none of that happened.”
I open my mouth to speak but she presses her fingers to my mouth, keeping me silent.
“You want me to forget about the past seven years I’ve spent making excuses as to why I won’t go on dates with men who were probably absolutely amazing,” she cries, her stance still defiant. “I couldn’t make myself vulnerable again that way because of you. But now that it’s you pursuing me, I should forget the past, right?”
I reach for her, needing to pull her body to mine, to allow her to feel the way my heart is racing as she screams at me for everything that I did to her. I don’t try to dispute her because these are her feelings and, while skewed from my memories of what happened, there is nothing she’s saying that doesn’t contain morsels of truth coated in hurt. She feints to the left, causing me to come back with an armful of air.