Chapter 51 Larissa
LARISSA
Stop.”
I smirked. “No.”
He shot me a playful look from across the couch and I smiled.
“You keep kicking me and I won’t share a blanket with you anymore,” he said.
I looked back at my book. “I bet you will.”
I burrowed my toes under him again and he set his book on the coffee table and grabbed my ankle. I shrieked and tried to wiggle away, but he climbed over me and pinned me while I laughed.
His eyes focused on my mouth. “Are you going to stop?” he whispered.
“No. My feet are cold.” I stuck my bottom lip out. He bent down, smiling, and drew it softly between his teeth. The nip turned into a kiss and I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him down on top of me. My book slid off the sofa and landed on the carpet with a soft thud.
“So let me get this straight…” I whispered. “You’re allowed to bite me but I’m not allowed to kick you.”
I moved my hips against the ridge pressing into my stomach. I felt him smile against my mouth.
“You can kick me, there’s just going to be consequences,” he said.
“Like?”
He sat up and started tickling me.
I giggled. “Okay, okay!”
He stopped and pulled me to him by the thighs and settled between my legs. He ran his lips along my jaw and I closed my eyes until his mouth wandered back up to mine.
“You’re smiling,” I said.
“I’m about to ask for my shirt back…”
I laughed and let him work it up over my head.
He tossed it over his shoulder onto the floor and it landed on Woofarine. He backed up into the coffee table and bolted out of the room wearing it like a tiny gremlin ghost. We laughed and Chris caged me under him and put soft pecks along my cheek.
“Hey, what do you think about taking a trip?” I asked.
He raised his head to look at me. “To where?”
I sat up on my elbows and shrugged. “I don’t know. Somewhere far enough away that we can be together without worrying who will see us. Somewhere different.”
I said it casually, but the truth was, I’d been thinking about it for a while. I wanted to get him out of here.
Chris put on a good facade. He was happy to be with me, I knew that, but he was sad. I could see it.
It had been three weeks since we were official.
At first everyone kept trying to reach out to him. He kept making excuses. Then the guys texted him to see what he wanted to do for his thirtieth birthday. He told them he was busy and had plans. The subsequent silence in the chat was deafening. I half expected Mike to call him. He didn’t.
I think they could rationalize Chris’s distance in the past couple of months given what happened on Christmas, but this was a statement.
Nobody texted him again after that.
They weren’t punishing him for what he’d done, they didn’t know about it. They were just taking the hint. And even though he knew this was coming one way or another, when it actually happened, it hit him harder than I think he anticipated.
He missed Mike. He missed his friends. I tried to get him to reach out to at least Xavier, but he wouldn’t.
Of everyone, Xavier tried the hardest to keep in touch with him and he already knew some of what was going on.
But Chris said if Xavier asked about me, he didn’t want to lie to him, and if he told him, we couldn’t see Xavier approving.
In the end, Chris couldn’t bring himself to reach out because the truth was, I didn’t think he could stand the rejection. So he just went on with his life.
That by itself was hard enough and the isolation didn’t help.
We were so set on keeping us private, we didn’t even dare to hold hands at the grocery store.
I was afraid to visit him at work now on the off chance Mike or Jesse or someone else we knew came in to fill a prescription, and there was a small part of me that worried every time we cuddled on the couch or walked around in our underwear that one of the guys would come knocking or peek through the blinds.
We needed to be a couple outside these four walls. Even just for a few days.
He scooted to lie next to me and propped himself on his elbow. “Going out of town sounds fun. When?”
“Let’s go for your birthday. You have PTO, right? I can take a few days off this week. I don’t have any orders until the weekend.”
“Okay,” he said. “What about Michigan?”
“I’ve never been there.”
“I used to go with my parents when I was little. We can drive,” he said. “It’s maybe ten hours?”
I smiled. “I always loved driving with you. I used to wish we could just keep going. Even before I knew why.”
He leaned down and put his forehead to mine. “I hated getting there. And then you couldn’t come home with me.”
“Now I’ll always come home with you,” I said quietly.
His face went soft.
“We can stay on Lake Michigan,” he said. “Maybe Traverse City?”
“I’ll find us someplace dog friendly,” I said. “The water will be too cold to swim in but we can get a rental with a view.”
He nodded. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
We listened to an audiobook on the way two days later.
It was raining and chilly when we got there, but we didn’t care.
It was somewhere we could go to a movie, slip into a café and share a booth without worrying we’d be seen.
Someplace that didn’t remind him of Mike or the friends he wasn’t celebrating his birthday with.
Our rental had a small balcony with a table and chairs and a view of Lake Michigan. There was a big tub, large enough for both of us.
After we off-loaded our luggage, we left Woofarine in his crate and went into town. We got books at the small bookstore, checked out the boutiques, went to dinner. I sang him happy birthday over a slice of chocolate cake with a candle in it.
Later, after we’d taken a bubble bath and tried out the bed, we lay naked, tangled together under the comforter, the rain pounding on the roof.
We’d lit the lemongrass candle we got at one of the boutiques we stopped at, and it flickered, casting a warm light against the wall.
Chris was kissing me softly and everything felt still and calm and perfect.
There’s something about going on a trip with someone.
Seeing how the love exists everywhere, that it’s something you carry wherever you go and not just the product of the world it was created in.
Going grocery shopping together in a store you’ve never been to, figuring out what new place you want to eat at, discovering everything together and it all feels different and new except for them. They’re the constant. The safe space.
“I almost woke you up last night,” I said, drawing lazy circles on his bare chest.
He tucked an arm behind his head. “Why didn’t you?”
“I didn’t want to wake you, but I also didn’t want you to be asleep anymore. Remember on that walk you showed me your water bottle?”
“Yeah.”
“I saw your stomach,” I said. “I liked it.”
“You saw everything that day. I took my shirt off.”
“Yeah, but that felt like I wasn’t supposed to see it,” I said.
He smiled with his eyes closed. “The first week you lived with me, you were reaching for a glass in the cupboard and your shorts rode up.”
I gasped playfully. “And you looked?”
“I couldn’t help it.”
“Hmm,” I said. “I did it on purpose…”
I felt the laugh rumble in his chest.
“Did you think about it later?” I asked.
“More than once, actually.”
“I used to smell your clothes when you weren’t home,” I said.
“I knew that.”
I drew my brows down. “How?”
“They weren’t exactly where I left them?”
I put my ear to his heart and closed my eyes.
“I liked how your hoodie smelled,” I said, remembering. “And that shirt you gave me on that walk.”
“You can have it if you want.”
“The shirt? Or the hoodie?”
“Both,” he said. “You can have anything of mine.”
I smiled. “You want to give me things? More than you already are?”
“I want to give you everything. I want to give you something that never ends,” he said, tucking my hair gently behind my ear.
“A book series you’re obsessed with that has a hundred volumes.
A song you never get tired of hearing on loop, a favorite meal you never get sick of eating.
A love that never fades. Someone you can’t wait to get home to, every day for the rest of your life. Something eternal.”
“I think you’ve already given me something eternal.”
I grinned up at him and he opened his eyes.
“I always looked at you,” he said quietly.
“Even when I wasn’t supposed to. Anytime I could.
At the cabin when you were in the lake on the tube.
I watched you from the window at the engagement party before I came down, because I knew I couldn’t look at you when I was there.
I looked when you wouldn’t notice. Any chance I got. ”
I smiled softly.
His face went a little serious. “You are my reason, you know that?”
I tilted my head. “For what?”
“For everything. For existing. For waiting forever, for not waiting at all.”
I sat up so I could look at him. He lay there, gazing at me.
“I thought I was going to have to watch you have a life with someone else, and that one day I was going to have to move on and do the same thing. But there would have been a morning sixty years from now when someone would search for a gravestone of a woman they don’t know to sprinkle their grandfather’s ashes over it in honor of a final request that nobody understands. I could never not love you. I tried.”
I felt my throat get tight.
“I will never forgive myself for the year we weren’t together,” I whispered.
“We were together. We got to be friends first. That’s better,” he said, brushing a thumb across my cheek. “You’re the best thing to ever happen to me, even if I had to wait for it. I’m just going to be grateful that it happened at all.”
We lay there, looking at each other. I could feel the love between us like a tangible thing. And I could feel the sadness too. I wished I could snip it like a frayed cord. Let it fall away and only the good parts would tether us. But we were bound by both.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get to be with Mike on your birthday,” I said.
He stared past me at the rain-streaked window. “I wouldn’t have hung out with him anyway,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I couldn’t forgive him for what he did.”
“You might have. If he changed enough.”
He looked at me. “Could you? Forgive him if he changed enough?” he asked.
“That’s not the same thing.”
I felt his lungs fill with air and slowly breathe out. “I hate lying to them,” he said quietly. “I wish I could just tell them and get it over with. So we don’t have to hide and we can have a normal life.”
“It’s been more than two months since Mike and I broke up. It’s March. Maybe it won’t be so bad?”
“But what if it is? None of them will ever talk to me again. That’s fine.
I expect that. But I just don’t know how he’ll take it.
I don’t want to be the reason why Mike has a mental breakdown just so I can feel better about not keeping secrets.
” He shook his head. “I just don’t know how to handle any of this. ”
I put my head on his shoulder. He threaded his hand in mine and closed his eyes.
I hated this. I wished this wasn’t the price. Or that if it was, I could be the one to pay it.
It was hard to imagine that I was a consolation for what he was giving up, no matter how wonderful the last month was.
In the four walls of our house, our life was perfect.
But what about the rest of it? He had no family.
He had no friends. He’d given up everyone and everything.
He was grieving people who were still alive.
“You are enough, you know,” he said quietly, like he’d read my mind. “I would do it all over again. I wouldn’t change anything.” He kissed the side of my head. “Except not smiling more.”
I laughed a little.
“I had a great birthday,” he said. “Thank you.”
“I love you,” I whispered.
I loved the way these words changed his face. The softness it made around his eyes.
All I could do was love him with everything I had—and it wasn’t even hard.
“Without trying to sound cliché, it feels like it’s us against the world,” he said.
“It sort of is. But we can make our own world. Our own traditions. One day we’ll have a family and new friends we’ve made together, and it won’t feel so lonely,” I said. “And one day Mike won’t care what we’re doing or who we love.”
He rubbed a gentle thumb across my cheek. “I know.”
We had a love that would never leave the world better than it found it. But it was what we had. And it was better than nothing.