“I want to go back, Eve. I want us to be whole again. I want it more than anything.” He touched his forehead to hers.
“We can’t, baby. We can’t go back. I wish we could, but I can’t be that girl again. Whether I want it to or not, what happened changed me, and I can’t be that sweet submissive thing you loved so much. I can’t let you pick out my clothes and make all the choices. I think I would have outgrown it anyway. I wonder all the time what would have happened.” It was the very thing that haunted her—the idea that no matter what had happened, she and Alex could have still broken up. “We were very young when we got married. I was already changing before Evans took me. It’s inevitable that people grow and change, and distance tends to follow.”
She felt his head shake. “No. We would have grown together. We would have changed and evolved because I would never have let it fall apart. We were stupid kids when we got married, but it was real and true and it should have been forever.”
But it wasn’t. It had been ten years of the contented happiness that came with a good marriage and then five years of aching loneliness, even when he was in bed beside her. It should have been forever, but there had been no happily ever after for them and there never could be until she let him go. “It broke. We broke and we can’t come back from that. We can’t pretend to be the kids we were before. We can’t have the marriage we had, and until we stop looking back, neither one of us can move forward. I’ve done this to us.”
“No. Eve, don’t,” Alex whispered. She could hear the pain in his voice.
Tears streaked down her cheeks, emotion rolling over her. She still loved him. She would go to her grave loving him, but she was right about this. They were broken and pieces were missing and couldn’t be replaced. “I’m so sorry, baby. I should have let you go a long time ago. We should have separated and allowed each other to heal. I’ve kept us in this corner because I was so scared of a life that didn’t have you in it. I was willing to keep both of us in hell instead of just letting go.”
“I don’t want you to let go. Can’t we just hold on? We can just hold on. We can get through it, angel.”
But they couldn’t. They had been trying for five years. “We’re different human beings now. I’ve changed on a fundamental level, and I hate that. I don’t think I can find a new me until we stop trying to get back to a place that doesn’t exist anymore. I’m going to stand beside you now, but when this is over, I’m leaving and I’m going to wish you all the best in the world because you deserve it. You deserve the woman who can be everything you need her to be. Someone whole.”
She’d been unkind for years because the only way she could keep him was to bind him to her with a contract that was a sort of half-life where they could pretend to still be together, where the past was still between them like a tantalizing dream of what once was.
But it couldn’t be again, and she had to let go. She’d accused Alex of not letting go, but she’d been holding the same broken pieces, too. She’d held them hard and fast despite the fact that she was bleeding every minute of the day.
The only way to move on was to let go. She’d been an anchor around his neck, dragging him down, taking what should have been the best years of his life.
His hands moved to her waist, his forehead settling against hers, and she felt the soft drop of his tears on her cheeks. They mingled there with the ones she shed, a final proof that once they’d been together.
She lifted her face, the moonlight illuminating him, showing her the pain in his eyes. The sound of the ocean was a bittersweet irony. They had begun their marriage on an island paradise, and they’d made love on the beach and watched the sun come up. She’d looked out and the ocean had seemed as endless as her love for him. The waves never ended, their potential infinite, and she and Alex had seemed the same way.
Her love was still there, but their potential had died in a fury of blood and pain and guilt. They were shattered. Nothing could take them back to a time when they weren’t, and she’d finally realized that if she loved him, she had to let him go.
She brought her nose to his, rubbing their skin together. When they’d been happy, they would lie together in bed for hours, just cuddling and exploring and touching. They would laugh and talk and end up making love, but not until they had teased each other into a frenzy. Most couples they had known would go home and watch TV together, but Eve and Alex had shed their clothes the minute the door was closed, and they had spent those precious hours naked and wrapped around each other.
She knew his body better than her own, knew every muscle, every hollow and valley and inch of his skin. She knew that kissing the back of his knees got him hard and he hated having his feet tickled. She knew how strong his heart was and how when he’d loved her, she’d been the queen of the world.