“When I do, it’s a conversation we’ll have. We’ll make that decision together.”
My eyes left his, my leg tangled tighter around us. I needed to be preparing myself to let go, instead of holding on tighter. I needed to focus on falling out of love with him instead of falling more in love. My life was here and in Paris. His life was going to be somewhere out there, and if luck had anything to do with where he was drafted, it would be in the city farthest from New York. That was my personal history with luck and the men in my life.
“This is your dream, Soren. It’s not something you discuss with a girl you’ve been dating a couple of months.”
His body tensed below me. “Yeah, this is my dream.” His words were just as tense. “That’s exactly why I will discuss it with the woman I love when it comes to that.”
My teeth worked my lip, trying to keep the tears away. “We’ll see,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he said, not a whisper at all, “we will.”
After that, we were quiet. Neither of us might have wanted to talk to each other right then, but we stayed close. His arm didn’t loosen around me, his chin tucked back over my head, and I worked my body a bit tighter around him.
Our time together was too rare and too valuable to spend it apart when we were both in the same zip code. Our time felt that much more valuable when I counted the weeks until June. There weren’t many.
I didn’t know how soon Soren would have to move to the city of the team that picked him—I didn’t know much about any of it—but instead of asking, I stayed ignorant. It felt better not to know than to be overwhelmed with looming dates and details.
Twilight was straining through the windows, which meant hours had passed since we’d burst through the apartment door, tugging at each other and tearing off clothes. We’d blown way past dinnertime, but I couldn’t think of anything important enough to leave this bed, to leave him.
Food. Water. The call of nature?
None of it appealed to me the way he and that bed did.
A couple of months ago, Soren had taken down the partitions and dragged our twin beds together to create whatever size that was. It was a little strange having a big seam going down the center of our bed, but Soren always took that spot, letting me have one side or the other. In the corner he’d shoved them, the partitions had started to collect dust. The walls had been taken down, but they weren’t gone. They were still there. Waiting for us to put them back up.
Or, I supposed, waiting for me to put them back up.
“You never talk about him—your dad.” Soren’s voice pushed into the silence, his words hesitant. “But I feel like he’s somehow always in the room with us.”
“Because that’s not creepy.” I pinched his side, attempting to keep this topic light. I couldn’t do heavy—not when it came to the man who’d brought me into a world he wanted no part of.
“You know what I mean.”
So much for the attempt at light and easy. Time to address it from another angle—the dismissive one. “I let go of him the same way he let go of us. That’s behind me.”
Soren’s throat moved against my head. “How does anyone ever put that behind them though?”
I wasn’t expecting tears. That’s what gave them their chance. “He left us.”
I was able to swipe the first tear away before he noticed, but the rest came too quickly to intercept. They fell down my face onto his chest, down the hollows his ribs formed. He held me as I cried, his clutch feeling impossibly strong, yet it wasn’t the least bit confining. He shared his strength instead of exerting it over me.
“No warning. No note,” I continued. “He just left for work one day and never came back. One wife, three daughters, he left it all behind to go live a different life.”
Soren didn’t say anything right away. I’d counted five times his chest had fallen, five times it had risen before he replied. “How do you know something didn’t happen to him?”
It would have made all our lives easier if something had happened to him like that. I’d often wondered if it would have even made his own easier.
“Every year on our birthdays, he’d send us an envelope with a five-dollar bill in it. No card. No note. Just a crumpled bill that smelled like cigarettes.”
My stomach turned when I remembered that smell. So strong, it seemed toxic. Each one of those five-dollar bills I received had been ripped into dozens of uneven pieces and burned in whatever fire I could find. Five dollars was a lot of money for us back then, especially for a girl who never had the luxury of extra spending money, but I’d never been tempted to keep one of those bills. Not once.
“My mom doesn’t have a degree or anything—they got married right out of high school when she got pregnant with me, and after that, she was too busy having us and raising us and working.” A few more tears spilled when I admitted to Soren that I was the reason my parents had married.
If she hadn’t gotten pregnant with me, if they hadn’t felt obligated to “do the right thing,” both of their lives could have been different. My mom had dreams. She must have. What eighteen-year-old didn’t? He’d probably had some too. Both had given them up because of me.
I didn’t want to have that kind of guilt on me again. Especially not from someone I loved the way I loved Soren. I wasn’t holding anyone else back from living the life they had planned pre-me entering the picture.
“Is that why you’ve never had any serious relationships?” Soren asked, his hand busy twisting through my mess of hair. “Because of your dad?”
“Would you be eager to get tied up in one after experiencing that?”
My head moved when lifted his shoulders. “I guess not.”
“I wasn’t the only one who waited forever to get involved with someone. What was your reason?” I asked, beyond eager to shine the conversation light on him after that surprise interrogation.
“I was too busy with school, sports, and a part-time job to squeeze in time for girls.” His fingers broke through the last couple of plaits left of my braid. “And I was waiting.”
“For what?”
“We’ve been over this.” He sighed in a way that made me picture his eyes rolling. “For you.”
As a smile formed, I wiped the last remnants of tears from my face. “You say the most romantic things to me when we’re tangled up naked in bed together.”
His arm hooked around me harder, dragging more of my body over his. “Best time to say them.”
“More like the most opportune time to say them,” I replied, wiggling against him to hint at what I meant.
“So very opportune.” He grinned at me, rubbing himself against me a few times.