“This is my home now. This is my life. This is who I am. Maybe we fit together like two puzzle pieces when we were kids, but we’re not going to fit together right now without the help of a good pair of scissors and some strong glue.”
He smirked, flashing a deep dimple on his left cheek before his face fell. The afternoon sun spilled in from behind us, highlighting the grimace of his expression and hiding the scar just above his lip. “I’ll bring the scissors. You bring the glue.”
“Even if I gave you another chance, I know myself. I’ll hold you at arm’s length, one foot on the ground,” I said, adding, “because there’s always going to be a part of me waiting for you to break my heart all over again.”
“I was careless with your heart,” he said. “I was selfish and egotistical. I turned into someone I hardly recognized – someone that had the power to destroy you – and that’s why I stayed away.”
I picked at the gray Belgian linen fabric of the sofa.
“Why you don’t believe me?”
“I don’t know what I believe.”
“Damn it, girl, you’re about as decisive as a kid at an ice cream shop.” Beau ran his hand against the smoothness of my naked shin, reminding me that we’d just shared a magical moment of delicious unrestraint, which had vaporized the second it was over.
“Why now? Why after all this time?” I asked, resting my cheek against the back of the sofa and staring into his tempered gaze as he studied me.
“In ten years, no one ever made me feel half the things you did.”
I silently agreed. Every man since him, including Harrison, only ever paled in comparison. I’d told myself that love wasn’t always fireworks, and I believed my own lies enough to settle for a soft, second-rate, boring version of love instead.
“Maybe I don’t deserve you,” Beau said. “But it doesn’t change the fact that I still want you to be with you, and it doesn’t change the fact that for the last ten years, I looked for you in every place you couldn’t be.”
I had looked for him too. While I’d never allowed myself to actively seek him out, I could never quite shake the feeling that our paths would cross again when I least expected it.
“I never doubted for a second that my soul would find yours again, and now that it has, I’m not letting you go.” He took the crook of my arm, pulling me into his lap. His fingers lifted to my lips, grazing them as if he were trying to memorize what they felt like. “Some people are real, Dakota, and some people are just an illusion of something real. And you? You’re the realest fucking thing I’ve ever known.”
His lips crushed mine as he breathed me in.
“I’d give it all up for this,” he said, placing his index finger against my beating heart. “That’s what I want. I don’t need a fat bank account or a fancy house on the water or a hundred thousand people screaming my name. I need this.”
Beau’s words seared my heart like a branding iron, the same way his promises had once upon a time.
“Maybe my word is shit to you,” he said. “But love isn’t what you say, it’s what you do. I’m sorry that some twenty-year-old kid left you with a bunch of empty promises and a trampled-on heart, but let this thirty-year-old grown man make it up to you.”
I teetered back and forth between the only two things I’d ever wanted in my entire life, and I couldn’t have them both.
“I need to digest all this,” I said, breaking my silence and climbing off him to gather my clothes. His face twisted into a smirk that indicated he was accepting my challenge. “Please don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Look at me like that.”
“How did I look at you?”
I gathered my bra from the floor and slipped on my panties. “The way you always look at me.”
With an enchanting flicker in your eye and a flash of your dimples that heat my core and tighten my chest until I can’t breathe.
“I’m not making any promises, Beau,” I said, stepping into my pants.
He rose up, re-dressing before stepping toward me. His lips pursed as he forced a hard breath through his nose. “I was going to try to sell you on how beautiful our life could be together back in Darlington, but I think you already know that. I’m going to give you space, Dakota, because that’s what you asked for. But I’m never going to stop wanting you. Never. And never is a promise.”
He pulled his shirt over his head and deposited a single kiss on my cheek before leaving.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I touched down in Detroit Tuesday afternoon and rented a car with only one destination in mind.
I had to see Daisy.
Heading south to Lincoln Park, I drove past the stretch of road that housed the bar where I’d once bumped into a sweet, small town girl with Midwest charm and an eternally hopeless soft spot in her heart for me. With a short detour at a local flower shop to pick up a bouquet of her favorite flowers, daffodils, I headed her way with a heavy heart.
In the distance was an arch with ornate spindles and metal lettering that read “Rest Haven Cemetery.”
I hadn’t been to see her in at least two years, mostly on account of how it tended to rattle my nerves and stir up the muck and mire that rested in the bottom of my soul.
Pulling up to a spot in the grass next to a granite headstone with her name on it, I grabbed the small bouquet and trekked through the soft ground, setting the flowers at the base of the stone below the engraving that declared her a “loving daughter” and nothing more.
“Hi Daisy,” I said softly, resting my hands on my hips and squinting as the sun blasted my eyes from just over the horizon. I pictured her blue eyes and the way her small hand used to feel in mine, and I fondly recalled those cold and lonely nights when she kept me warm, always picking me up when I was low and giving everything to me straight up with no chaser. She always seemed to know what I needed to hear, at least in the beginning. My only regret was that I couldn’t love her the way she deserved. “This time of year always gets me thinking about you. I just wanted to pay my respects. I apologize for not coming to see you more often, but I think you’d understand. You were always very patient and understanding with me. Probably more than I deserved. Anyway.”
It felt silly talking to a stone, but it’d seem even sillier talking to her inside my head. A warm breeze rustled the leaves of the mighty oak that shaded her final resting place.
“I’m sorry for all the ways I hurt you, Daisy,” I said, pulling in a strong breath as I recalled the way she’d left my house in a rush to get home. The next morning, I’d called her and offered to support her for as long as it took so she could get back on her feet. She’d lived in the lap of luxury for three years, and I wasn’t about to dump her with nothing. Not long after that, she got involved with the wrong kind of people, and it turned out she was using my monetary assistance to support her brand new heroine addiction. “And I’m sorry I didn’t get to tell you that when you were still here.”