When she turned around her eyes were wide, full of tears, and her lips were parted and trembling. “What do you want from me?” Tears fell down her cheeks as she pleaded for an answer.
“I need to be close to you,” I admitted, feeling my lips tremble too. “Please let me be close to you.” I was twisting my fingers together, begging pathetically for something I didn’t deserve.
She brushed her cheeks. “What does that even mean to you? What are you asking me for?”
I could think of a thousand ways to answer that question, and I glanced away trying to figure out the simplest explanation. “I want to talk to you, and I want you to talk to me. I want to touch you, and I want you to touch me too. I want to hold you.” I gave up hiding the tears, and when I blinked they ran down my cheeks. “I won’t look for pain from another man’s fist to release me from what hurts so much in my head. I’ll tell you what hurts instead. I won’t use sex with other women to hide from my pain. But I’ll give it to you if it’s what you need from me.”
I walked up to her, and she just watched me. Her body looked rigid with tension, and I could see the tendons in her neck strained tight. I stood just in front of her, not willing to touch her until she gave me permission.
“I want all of you, regardless of the fact I deserve nothing from you. Things can’t go on this way with us. It’s tearing me apart. I put myself in your life, because I wanted to see who you were now.” I shook my head as I stared off beside us for a moment. “I didn’t realize it would be so … powerful. Powerful enough I want to give it the chance to rewrite the direction of my life.”
I stood there gasping in shock at the words I was saying, and more than that at what they ultimately meant for me.
Her eyes moved down to settle on my chest, but she didn’t respond.
“We deserve to go back and be us again. Not the us that came after that night. The us before. We were good for each other. I was good for you once—even if no one else in the world saw it or understood that.”
She took a deep breath, but she still stared at my chest.
“I need to be near you, and I don’t know what that looks like. But I do know I need it. Please give me another chance.”
Her eyes remained down, but they were swollen and pink, and her cheeks were streaked with tears. “Okay,” she whispered on an exhalation. When she inhaled again, the air rattled through her lungs as though that one word had sent a rush of something palpable through her.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
We stood there staring at one another’s chests. My brain swirled with that notion again—such a beautiful notion. Was I really going to unbind myself from the shadows? Could I do that for her?
We were silent as we walked out to the parking lot. We must look ridiculous, as though we’d just left a funeral rather than class, and when we’d pass someone in the hallways, we’d lower our heads in tandem to hide the puffy, bloodshot eyes. I didn’t touch her, and we kept a modest six inches between our bodies as we walked. But when we reached her car, she turned to me.
She looked exhausted, and I took her briefcase from her, opening the car door and setting it on her driver’s seat. I wanted to touch her, but I waited for her to make the first move. She eventually did. She stepped right up to me, gripped the sides of my waist with her hands, and let her forehead drop to my chest.
“We’re going to be okay,” I said as I wrapped my arms around her. I had no doubt she could be okay all on her own without my presence in her life. But I also had no doubt I never would be without her. “We’re going to be okay,” I repeated.
She’d said those words to me once. A monster had hurt me, and I’d given up for a while. But she hadn’t. She’d been in pain and scared, and she’d still curled herself around me and reassured me, letting me feel her warmth.
Chapter Seventeen
Helene
Eleven Years Ago
By the time we reached my house I was nearly asleep on the bench seat of Kane’s truck. My head was next to his thigh as he drove, and I stared at the old radio in the truck’s dashboard. We were usually laughing when we were in this truck together, talking, goofing around, just being us. I hated this truck at the moment.