I sense he wants to be alone. He’s a wall, impenetrable as steel. I move to get up. He leans and whispers something in my ear. “Stay.” He sounds intense. His facial expression matches the intensity of his voice.
I can barely stand the chiseled angles in his face. He is a man, human, and in so many ways he’s just like me. You were dealt a bad hand and you stopped playing the game. What if we got dealt a new game…would he play for it?
I’m struck with the realization that he loved her, and unlike my situation with Paul, because she was taken early, she will always be the object of his love.
His raw, primal, male love.
A pain blossoms in my chest and I’m afraid that it’s jealousy that I’m feeling. I don’t know why, because I sure don’t expect anything from him of that sort. “You see her in every woman, don’t you?”
He laughs, then scrapes a hand over his beard. “That’s right.”
I hold his hand. It feels natural to, like a friend move in a moment like this. But there’s fire streaking up my arm as his hand encloses mine completely and he holds me firmly in his grip. “Tell me about her.”
“She used to say the oddest things. She’d notice things nobody else did. Always see the good in people.” He looks in the distance, his eyes gaining a rebellious glint. “I never was good enough for her.” He eyes me. “Just like I’m not good enough for you.”
His eyes start dancing like a bad boy’s, and I love the playful sensuality in his lips—like he doesn’t take anything too seriously. Except maybe this moment with me right now. Because there, right under the playful sensuality, is a heat I’ve never seen shine quite so brightly. A heat that looks like the churning, burning, boiling need inside me now.
He drags a hand over his face. “She was my girlfriend when she was diagnosed. Leukemia. A rare form, PCL. The prognosis was two years, and even now, treatment is still experimental. I married her because I didn’t want her to feel alone. She got sick while still a teenager. I was barely eighteen too. We were just kids.”
“God, I’m sorry. So what did you do?”
“Everything. Chemo, radiation, stem cell transplant. They kept her in a glass box. To prevent infection. It was like being in a nightmare, and there was no waking up. She never came out of that box. I felt complete helplessness just watching her, not touching her, not kissing her, watching her fight all alone. She never complained, she was always smiling…you get dealt this shit hand, the least you can do is say FUCK YOU.”
“She wasn’t alone, you were there. And maybe she chose to fight, stayed positive for your sake.”
“Oh I know that’s what she did. So it was all a lie. Every day she would say she felt good when I could see her withering away.” He laughs. “She died in that glass box, my little virgin wife.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I left the city shortly after. It hurts to care that much for one person. She was so damn sweet, she didn’t deserve it. And when they’re no longer by your side, you’re fucked. It takes so much to build yourself back up. I promised myself I’d never, ever go through that again.”
“I can see how that would make it hard to connect with a woman that way.”
“Impossible.”
We sit in silence for a moment. I really don’t want to impose on any time of reflection that he might need, so I move to leave. But Tahoe has lightning-fast lacrosse player hands, and he quickly snatches my wrist and squeezes. “Hey. Stay.”
I look into his eyes with a growing heaviness in my chest.
There are fears in your life that neither you nor any man on this Earth can spare you from. Fears so deeply entrenched, there is no corner in your soul to hide, no way of escaping them. They grab you, own you, squeeze the life out of you, until you wake up sweating in the middle of the night, in tears, and you’re frantic to touch the ground beneath you because you still feel like you’re falling…and falling…a never-ending drop. Until a painfully hard surface breaks your fall.
That hard surface, for me, is Tahoe Roth.
But for the first time in my life, the need to comfort a man is far greater than any need I have for self-preservation. So I stay and entwine my fingers through his, setting my forehead against his as we close our eyes.
He whispers in my ear, dark with guilt, as if he’s confessing his worst offense ever, “I picture you in my bed.” He cups my face in one big palm and looks into my eyes.
“I’m here,” I whisper.
He laughs darkly and kisses my cheek. “That’s not what I meant.”
SPOONING
I’m being spooned when I wake up. I do a mental inventory and realize I’m in a soft bed next to something hard and that I’m in a pair of huge, thick arms and the one draped around my waist weighs about a ton.
I exhale and keep doing inventory.
Okay, so I’m still dressed.
And he’s bare-chested and with his jeans unbuttoned.
Which is kind of a big deal because I can feel…everything.
The kind of body that deserves to be in an underwear ad, and the kind of male…anatomy worthy of, well, porn.