Chapter 29 Dance Away the Pain #2
My head tore up with the sound, a panicked breath slicing between my teeth at being caught in such a pathetic mess of a moment. That panic sucked in through my lungs to fill up my heart as I saw just who was standing on the inside of the door.
“You can’t be here,” I whispered just barely. He probably couldn’t even hear me.
He didn’t respond even if he heard. He just continued to stare down at me from across the room with eyes ambushed by pity and that heart-buckling compassion that always dressed his gaze.
With his eyes so intent on me, I realized the damp state of my cheeks and probable disarray of my eye make-up. The tears transferred from my face to the back of my arm as I swiped it across my cheeks, sniffling back the tears that were prepped and ready to make an appearance.
And then, still without saying anything, he began his way towards me.
As his pitying gaze loomed closer, the larger the alarm grew in my heart. “You can’t be here.”
Still, he ignored me. He ignored me until he had made it to me, crouched down on the ground in front of me, and the panic in my heart outgrew its confines and overflowed into every crevice in my body. With him so close, my entire body ignited with an energy too potent for my skin to contain.
And when he cupped his hand against the side of my face, I damn near felt like I might literally explode.
“Ethan, please .” His name came out like another gut-wrenching sob. “You shouldn’t be here.”
His eyes passed over my face, observing me with a particular intimacy.
“I can’t imagine being anywhere else right now.”
The patch of his thumb brushed beneath my eye to remove fallen tears, but his tender action only brought on more as they blurred the perfect sight of him in front of me.
“How did you even know where I was?”
His mouth pulled to the side. “You’re a woman of many mysteries, but where you’d go when you’re sad is not one of them.”
“But you’re not supposed to be h—”
“No.” He cut me off gently, shaking his head. “None of that matters right now. I’m here to make sure you’re okay.”
Blinking back more tears as they threatened to press against the backs of my eyes, I shrugged.
“I’m fine.”
The disbelieving look Ethan gave me was subtle but recognizable. “The tears in your eyes aren’t helping you sell that fib, Slim.”
Quickly, I blotted them away with the pads of my palms and did my best to ignore the leap my heart did as he called me by that name.
“Does my sister know you’re here?”
Somber guilt took over the sympathy he held for me on his face and quietly, he responded. “No.”
“Then I think you should go.”
Ethan met me with an even tone and sincerity in his bright eyes. “Do you want me to go?”
The word ‘yes’ hitched in my throat as I went to say it. My silly heart reached up and held onto it as my morals fought to release it. Telling him to go was the right thing to do, whereas telling him to stay would admit to wanting more from him than he could give me.
Yet, with his eyes holding mine as tenderly as they were, the right thing to do felt like it would inflict all the pain I was feeling now, except with double the impact.
In fact, the mere idea of watching him leave out those doors had already dripped lines of despair down my face.
Ethan saw those tears fall just as he must have seen the conflict writhing inside me.
I couldn’t say no, but I also couldn’t make myself say yes, and in less than a second, warmth and the smell of the man I could never have surrounded me.
Ethan’s affection collapsed the momentary hold in my breakdown and I fell into him, arms locked around his neck and my face hidden against his shoulder.
I wept in his arms and he let me, holding me tighter with each sob that jabbed at my chest. Together, we sat on the floor of the ballet room in each other’s arms, letting the music around us cast a brief cover for our stolen moment.
“What’s wrong with me?” I asked between cries.
“Nothing’s wrong with you.” His voice was as comforting as his touch that ran zig-zag lines up and down my back. “Your ex is an idiot for ever letting you go.”
“No. No , that’s not it.”
Sniffling, I pushed myself back from Ethan’s embrace just enough to look at him, to see him when I told him the truth behind my tears. “That’s not why I’m upset. I’m not upset that we aren’t together anymore or even that he’s engaged.”
His thumb catching more tears beneath my eyes, he said, “Then what’s making you cry?”
“I’m crying because… this proves the thing I’ve been trying to lie to myself about for months.”
Curiosity dipped both of his dark eyebrows together. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that—” A hiccup broke in between my words. “That for five years, I wasn’t good enough to want to propose to. I’ve tried to tell myself that’s not it, but now… with her… all it took was five months and he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.”
“Alice,” Ethan tried, but I stopped him.
“For five years I wasn’t enough, wasn’t smart enough or pretty enough or adventurous enough, and I tried to tell myself that’s not why we didn’t work out. I’ve tried telling myself that it wasn’t my fault, but now…” A breath rattled through my chest as I took it in. “Now I have proof that it was.”
Sadness crept into the electric blue circling Ethan’s pupils. “It wasn’t your fault, Slim. He cheated and that’s his fault, not yours.”
“Yeah, but what if it’s me? What if anyone I’m with ends up doing the same because of the same reasons Jonah did? What if I’m never good enough?”
A sigh from Ethan blew across my face, cooling my tear streaks and tasting raw on my parted lips.
“I could sit here and tell you the many reasons I know you’re good enough.” His eyes were all across my face, carrying with them a grief that sat shallow below the surface. “But I don’t think you want me to do that.”
At hearing those words, my bruised heart joined my battered soul at the bottom of my stomach, both mangled so badly by this point that I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between them.
When was this going to be over? It had to end at some point, right? Neither Ethan nor I could continue going on like this, hounded by the knowledge that we wanted more from each other than was right to want. Eventually, the pain and the longing would have to subside, right?
“No…” My voice trembled with the potency of the lie in that one word. “I’d be a terrible person if I asked for that.”
“That wouldn’t make you a terrible person, Alice.”
Truthfully, I bet he had to say that. If it didn’t make me a terrible person to want to hear it, then it didn’t make him a terrible person for how badly he wanted to say it.
“Then what would it make me?”
He paused, thoughtful for only a second. “Human.”
“Well, I hate it.”
A brief laugh pushed through his nose. “I didn’t think you had it in you to hate anything.”
If only he knew. If only he didn’t hold me up on this pedestal he’d made out of his misplaced affection for me, he’d be able to see all the nasty, hateful emotions my world was resting on.
“I’m not so perfect.”
“Then I guess perfection is subjective.”
And that’s the closest he would come to saying what he wanted when it came to how he thought of me.
A few carefully chosen but damnably disabling words that hinted at us as much as either of us would dare.
The big bad us . On some level, we both knew that if we said it, if we acknowledge its existence now that we had locked it away, even the mention of it would be enough to rip open the chains encasing the box.
If the us we knew we could never be managed to get loose again, it would be fatal for anyone within the blast radius.