Chapter Seven
T hey got up and made dinner—an unholy combination of cheese, crackers and summer sausage.
They brought it into the living room and sat by the fire. All the lights were off, the only glow coming from the fire. The house felt quiet and dark. Empty. She’d never been here before without the whole family filling it up. Not without Reggie cracking jokes and Marcus quietly egging him on.
Without her little half siblings running around, their feet heavy on the floor and her mom and Buck talking and laughing together.
Her and Colton navigating around each other like ships dodging sharp rocks.
But their family wasn’t here.
And they were.
All of today had been a strange thing. Wonderful. But...sad in some ways.
She could feel something desperate coming from Colton, and she couldn’t quite get a read on what it was.
She was beginning to come to terms with the fact that they were going to have to deal with this. Deal with each other.
Deal with the fact that it was still love.
She had realized that in the shower, with him inside of her. And maybe that was ill-advised for a woman who had been a virgin until yesterday, to go calling sex love , but for them, it had always been love.
From the day they had met.
It didn’t matter if anybody else would be able to see it. Nothing mattered except how they felt about each other.
But she could sense that there was real fear, turmoil, going on inside of him.
She also knew that just because you got something good, just because you had a good thing, didn’t mean you couldn’t sometimes profoundly miss what you might have had. She’d spent the first seventeen years of her life with her wonderful mother, and then her family had expanded, and still, she had gone looking for her father. Colton had been denied a family for so long. Of course he must feel... He must feel terribly incomplete in some ways still.
She looked down at her plate, and she tried to figure out what to say. But she realized she only really had one thing left to say.
“I love you,” she said.
He froze.
And she knew she had made a mistake. How was it that she always chose the wrong moment, the wrong words, with this man?
Was this her punishment? Her karmic debt that she had to pay? She had broken his heart, and so now he was going to break hers?
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t. Don’t apologize.”
“Well, what else am I supposed to do when you look at me that way?”
“You don’t have to say you’re sorry, dammit,” he said.
“Well, I feel sorry. I feel very, very sorry.”
“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
“Unless it’s that you love me too, then, I’m sorry.”
“It’s not...” He sat up, tenting his fingers beneath his chin, looking straight ahead. “It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not that simple because... I just can’t.” He looked at her. “Don’t look at me like that, Lily, because it’s your fault. When we were seventeen, I thought everything was going to be okay. For the first time in my life, I thought it would be. I thought you and I were a sure thing. And yeah, that’s a stupid thing to think when you’re seventeen. But I did. I believed in it, I believed in you. You broke us. And it was like... The final nail in the coffin of me being able to have hope. I can’t just resurrect it now.”
“But I’m sorry,” she said, her throat going tight. “I was... I was stupid then. And maybe I was afraid. Afraid because I thought I was going to make the same mistakes my mother did. Afraid because... Why wouldn’t I be? What I knew about love was that it could leave you by yourself with all the pieces of your shattered self and a child to take care of. I was afraid. I wanted to make a future for myself. I wanted to have an independent life. I couldn’t see a way around that. A way that...that included you. Not then. I was also afraid that if I did the wrong thing, then my mom would never be happy. I needed her to be happy. So much. So badly. I really wanted her to be happy.”
“But you want to take it all back now, and you want to take the damage back with it, and it just is not simple.”
“Maybe not. But what if I don’t need you to say anything right now. We are...whether we want to be or not...we’re stuck together, Colton. We are family.” She laughed. “It has never mattered that these feelings hung between us—we still had to see each other. We still had to contend with each other. I thought it was love then, and I told myself it couldn’t be. That I was too young. I talked myself out of it because I didn’t want to be that serious that early. But it was love then, and it’s love now. It is always love. It always has been.”
“That’s why it left such a deep scar. And I just... I don’t want to.”
She looked at him, and she saw years of loss. The kind she could never fully understand.
She had certainly been through her own pain, her own heartache, but it had never been this. Not what he had been through. She’d had stability. A mother who loved her.
He’d had heartbreak and all of these unclosed wounds. All of this unresolved trauma.
“I don’t need you to answer me now,” she said.
“I don’t think I can. Not ever. Listen, I’m sorry. It’s not you. It’s everything. Yes, you were part of it. But since then, I’ve... figured out how to deal with things, but it isn’t always healthy, or good. It isn’t always in a way that makes me better. I’m not better. I’m just...limping along.”
“You’re not. You are so wonderful. You have come out of so much trauma with so much to offer. And I want to marry you. Colton. I really think it would be good and we could be happy.”
He looked like she had struck him, his eyes full of pain, but he drew a shade down over his emotions, and he didn’t let her look at him anymore.
“Colton...”
“Lily, I need you to listen to me. There’s just too much wrong with it. With me.”
“What about the snow? The snow on the beach. I thought... I thought you said it meant something. That it was special.”
“It was. Something can be special without being forever. Maybe we just both have to accept that.” He stood. “I think it’s probably better if I don’t stay.”
“No. I want you to stay.”
“Lily, I think it was a mistake. For us to indulge in a fantasy that isn’t going anywhere.”
“It’s not going anywhere because you won’t let it. Because you won’t... Dammit, why can’t you just be brave?”
“Because I’ve already had to be brave for too many years, for too long. Because I watched my mom sink deeper and deeper into addiction and not be able to get out of it. Because I went through too fucking much already. I won’t do it again.”
He walked through the kitchen and grabbed his keys off the counter. He didn’t go upstairs, he didn’t get his things. He just walked straight out of the house and drove off, leaving her there alone.