Chapter 23 #2
How could she say… Anything to this? Zane was the most amazing, wonderful person.
He had given her more orgasms than she could count, he had given her this prom, he was incredible, and everything, but she was…
She was just getting started. She was just getting started on her freedom.
On living, and if she stopped that now… wouldn’t her life shrink again?
“I…” She swallowed hard. “I’m scared.”
“That’s okay,” he said, his hand warm on her face. “It’s okay if you’re scared. It’s okay if you can’t say anything. It’s just a miracle to me that I can even feel this. It’s a miracle to me that I have the gift of this. Cara, I don’t need you to give me anything back.”
How could he say that? His whole life had been this horrendous grief, with him loving his family and not being able to get anything back because they were gone.
How could she ever put him through that? He had been worried about hurting her, and she had been worried about getting hurt, but she hadn’t imagined that she could be putting herself in a position where… Where she could fail him.
She took a step back from him, the rain pounding down on her.
“Cara…”
Then, she turned around and started running. She ran, like she had never done before, her dress was heavy and waterlogged, and she lifted it up above her knees as she fled through the field.
She wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t afraid of the storm or the wilderness, or any animal she might encounter. She was only afraid of her own feelings. Only afraid of her heart. Only afraid of all the ways in which she might have failed them both.
Afraid of losing her grip on herself, her brand-new self that she had just met.
She ran, all the way to the hotel, and pushed the lobby door open, light bathing her skin, the warmth from indoors touching her freezing skin and making her shiver.
Chris, Marlowe’s most favorite employee, who Cara had gotten to know pretty well, stood up abruptly when she walked in. “Cara, are you all right?”
The office door opened, and Marlowe came out holding a stack of papers, and then set them down quickly when she saw Cara.
“What’s going on?”
Cara started to tremble, and then, she fell apart entirely.
She started crying, gasping for air, and Marlowe jerked her back behind the counter and ran into the office. “Just give us a minute,” she shouted to Chris, closing the door and plunking Cara down in the office chair. “What happened?”
“He said that he loved me.”
“Oh…”
“He wasn’t supposed to love me. This was just supposed to be for fun. This was just supposed to be… it wasn’t supposed to be anything. It wasn’t supposed to be forever. I was supposed to be starting over, and building a life and… I can’t… I can’t love him.”
“Did he ask you for anything?”
“No.”
“Did he demand that you marry him tomorrow and start having his babies?”
“No… But…”
“I know that getting serious when you don’t want to be is really scary.
Trust me. I know. I was only supposed to be in it with Cody for the D, and it turned out to be the L word instead.
And that was really scary. Because the ink wasn’t even printed on my divorce papers, much less dried, and I didn’t want to tie myself down again when I thought maybe I should be out exploring.
But there’s no good sense of timing in the universe, I find.
You don’t always get what you want, you get what you need. ”
“That’s a song,” Cara said.
“Sure. Whatever. Because it’s true, and I think that Zane is what you need.”
This crushing sense of inadequacy filled her, and she couldn’t put into words why. Everything inside of her was like a blaring panic siren. One she couldn’t fully figure out.
She didn’t know why she felt this way. Why she felt so terrified, other than the reasons that she had given, but she felt like there was something else, and she couldn’t fully get a handle on it.
She was hyperventilating, though, felt like she was being strangled by the wet, stiff fabric on this dress that had made her feel like a princess moments ago, and now made her feel like a prisoner.
“Come on, I’ll get you up to my room. And I’ll get you some bathrobes from housekeeping.”
“I know Zane reserved us a room.”
She sounded miserable. She felt miserable.
“Yes. He did. But if he comes, I will simply tell him that it is guest confidentiality that I can’t say where you are. Obviously, he paid for a room, he gets to check into it.”
“I don’t want to hide from him. I just… I can’t give him what he wants.”
“He didn’t ask you for anything, you said it yourself.”
“But… he will want something. He will. That’s just how it works.”
“Yeah, that’s kind of the cost of loving people. They tend to want things. But they give a lot too.”
Marlowe ushered her out of the office and to the elevator. She stopped by housekeeping, grabbed a big, fluffy robe, and sent Cara down the hall with the key. She’d said she was going home to Cody, so she wouldn’t be using the apartment tonight.
Cara unlocked the door and walked in, everything squishy and wet and miserable.
She unzipped her dress, her cold skin relieved, as she walked into the bathroom and turned the shower on.
She stepped out of that dress and laid the robe out on the bathroom counter.
Then she sat on the closed toilet while she waited for the water to warm up, her face in her hands.
What was she doing? This was why she had thought that she needed training wheels before she tried to learn how to ride a real bike.
Because she had gone and gotten herself into a situation that she wasn’t equipped to deal with. She had gone and gotten herself into a situation that was way too big for her to handle.
As she stepped underneath the warm shower spray, she let her tears blend in with the water, with the lingering rain.
If any of it was a blessing, she couldn’t feel it.