I was startled by his question, and Trip could feel me tense against his body. He tried to calm me, rubbing a palm along my shoulders.
“Oh, Trip. It was truly the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life. I just… I don’t even know if I’ll be able to talk about this.”
“We have to. C’mon. Brain vomit away.”
He was right. We had to do this. It was time to just lay everything out on the table. I took a deep breath and launched in. “I was scared. You need to understand that I’d spent ten years living my life in a daze, and I didn’t even realize it. I pushed myself to do well in college, then I pushed myself to get a good job. The job I ended up with wasn’t a good one, but it had promise, and I kept waiting for it to get better. I had this blinders-on focus just to keep moving forward, live my life like a real adult. A very powerful man asked me to be his wife, and I thought marrying him was what I was expected to do.”
Trip winced at the reference to my ex-fiancé, but I had no words of comfort for him. If we were going to get through this, we both needed to hear things we might not like.
“I was finally on the verge of achieving everything I’d worked for, everything I’d ever wanted. Or so I thought.” I smoothed a hand over his to continue, “I’d finally gotten a shot to prove myself as a reporter—interviewing you—and I figured my life was really beginning. It was, of course, but not because of my job and my fiancé, like I’d thought.”
“What do you mean?”
“My life had started because of you. Because you’d come back into it. Only I was too stupid to realize it. I didn’t know… until after.”
Trip repositioned himself on the couch, settling me between his legs and leaning me back against his torso. I could sense his reluctance to speak as an uneasy silence crept between us. Finally, he asked, “How long after?”
“Not long.” I hesitated for a second, but decided to just forge on. “I may not have gone to the hotel that night, but I went the next day, you know. I went there for you. But you were already gone.”
“Is that why you tried to call? Because you didn’t get to say goodbye?”
Oh, holy Jesus. I knew we had to do this. But he really had no clue.
“Not exactly. But you wouldn’t even speak to me.”
He let out with a heavy breath. “I was hung-over and heartbroken, babe. When I realized you weren’t coming that night, I got stinking drunk. That next day, I woke up Hunter and had him bump up my flight. I didn’t want to be in that city an extra second. I was at the airport when Sandy called to tell me you wanted my number. I poured out the whole pathetic story, told her to call you back, but then to pull the battery from her phone the second she hung up with you. I set her up with a new number so you couldn’t get in touch with me.” He sounded guilty about all that, but he had no idea what sort of chain-reaction he was truly responsible for.
“I tried everything I could think of to contact you. You didn’t even give me a chance to explain.”
“I didn’t want to hear you say it. I didn’t want to hear you say you picked the other guy.”
Hearing him lay that right out there caused a fracture to form, right down the middle of my heart; I could feel his being broken. God. I really hoped we were done causing each other so much grief. “You really spent the whole night drinking?” It was ludicrous to feel relieved at his admission. But the drinking, I could handle. Sex with a replacement, I could not.
“Drinking doesn’t cover it. I got completely polluted.” He chuckled, but it was just a cover. “What about you? What did you do with your night after you kicked me out of your apartment with a raging hard-on?”
It was so difficult to talk about, even after all those years, even with him sitting right there, back in my life, the idea that our future together was an established possibility.
“Well, I didn’t sleep much, for starters. At all, actually. The next morning, I went into work, only to find I didn’t have a job waiting for me. Devin had fired me so casually, and I got offended enough to break off our engagement. But it was more than that. I realized he wasn’t… He wasn’t nearly the right man for me. That’s when I went back to the hotel to find you, but you had already gone. I already knew I’d made a huge mistake by not showing up the night before, but I didn’t realize how huge until I saw the package waiting for me when I got home.”
Trip’s face fell. “Wait. You didn’t get it until…”
“Right. That next day.”
His hand clamped into a fist and a muscle was working furiously in his jaw.
“I died, Trip. I swear. I had no idea that you were trying to do anything other than take me to bed the day before. When I saw that lunchbox…”