Chapter 38 If Only
T here was nothing easy or simple about the way Ethan was staring at me as I stood on the other side of the bedroom, unmoving.
He looked at me with the face of a young man but eyes of a man who’d lived many sad lives. The blue of his eyes seemed darker—faded even—like a light had died out inside of them.
What waited for me on his side of the room was darkness, regret, and a similarly bleeding heart. I could feel his pain reaching out to me, banging on the caved in walls of my heart and begging for relief. We could give that to each other—relief. But it wouldn’t last.
Still, I let the hand of pain drag me along the floor to him like I had no choice in the matter.
Truthfully, I’d lost control of all choices when Ethan’s lips first touched mine all those weeks ago, and I had yet to regain it back.
There were moments where I came close and times where I thought I found my way back on track.
But every time Ethan looked at me, my compass spun, and I lost my way all over again.
“I assume Monica told you?”
I nodded.
He breathed out a long sigh, polluting the air with more melancholy. There was so much hurt and remorse clouding the space between us that I could hardly see through it all down to him. The vision of Ethan was fading away right before me.
Everything around us was growing dark and bleak.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Ethan shut his eyes, the skin next to them pinching together, drawing in stress between each line. My mind drifting back to the locked door, I lifted my hand to his face. I wanted the lines gone. I hated the reminder of what they represented.
A shudder vibrated beneath my touch as I laid my fingers across his cheek, smoothing out the stress tonight had put there.
Ethan let go of another breath as I caressed my hand across his rigid jawline, and up through his soft as silk hair.
Ethan sunk further and further into me, the weight of his head resting against my stomach.
There, he shook his head to say ‘no’.
My eyes pressed shut, and even though I knew that would be his answer, I still felt so sad.
My sadness was a dagger dipped in poison.
Each stab to my chest seared with the pain of its intrusion, but what came after the pain was a sickness—debilitating and nauseating—that crept through my heart, my blood, my bones, sealing in the feeling for good.
This poison infused my system with an indefinite and inescapable sadness that felt worse than death itself, I imagined.
“Is there anything I can do?”
Ethan’s hands found the dips of my waist, holding me against him.
“Turn back time.” He paused between his next words. In that beat, his hands around my waist tightened. “Make it so I met you first.”
It hurt to think about how much easier things would be had Ethan met me before he met Monica.
We’d be in love and freely so. This Thanksgiving trip would have been about introducing the man of my dreams to my parents and showing off how happy and in love I was with this perfect man.
We wouldn’t be sad or hiding away in my bedroom, whispering so that no one heard us.
I’d sell my soul to the devil to go back in time and do it all over again.
“Anything else?” I spoke softly, playing my fingertips around the hairs curling at the nape of his neck.
Ethan lifted his head up and buckled my weak heart with the need in his eyes.
“Let me hold you.”
I was nodding sooner than my mind could catch up, sliding down onto Ethan with my legs on either side of him, straddling his lap.
I wanted this too. So badly. I needed his comfort, his skin, his safe haven built from the remains of our love.
His palms slipped beneath the back of my shirt, burning the fire of his perfect touch into my skin, and I wanted to cry at how good it felt.
Both of his arms anchored around my small waist, hugging me into him as the crisp embered smell of him willed more tears to the surface.
My hair fell on either side of us, curtaining around our faces to hide our longing looks and forgotten shame as our lips teased closer and nearly touched.
They never passed that line though, and probably for the best. Monica was still very much a presence in that room, and what happened between them tonight was not easily forgotten.
“She said that she loves you.”
Slowly, Ethan shook his head. “She doesn’t mean it. Not in the way she thinks she does.”
“How do you know?”
Ethan allowed a silent break between us to study me, to memorize everything there was to know about me in this moment before I became just a memory.
“Being in love with someone looks and feels a lot different than loving the idea of someone. You can see it in a person’s eyes. When Monica looks at me, I see nothing. It’s just… blank.”
Then, his eyes grabbed mine and I swear I saw a star shoot across them both.
“When you look at me, I see the whole universe in your eyes.”
And in his, I saw the same. I saw galaxies, the sun and the moon, and endless constellations of beauty and bright colors that they were all made of.
I also saw the end of it all—our apocalypse—and it was here and now, and there was nothing we could do to save the world we made when we were together.
It was over.
We were over.
“It’s always going to be you, Slim. It’s never going to be anyone else.”
I knew I had tears in my eyes at this point. I could feel them sitting there along the brim, heavy and threatening to spill.
“But it can’t be me.”
Ethan’s gaze exchanged back and forth between the tears in each of my eyes and looked like he wanted to brush them away, though they hadn’t fallen yet. The helpless sheen to his stare as he watched me intensified the nearly crippling pang in my chest.
For the first time since this all started, the white of Ethan’s eyes turned red with the breach of physical grief.
“I know,” he whispered. My heart literally burned with the severity of seeing him so lost, so overcome with defeat as he admitted out loud for the first time, that he and I would never be together.
“I would rewrite every star in the sky if it meant I could be with you, even if it was just for a day.” Though his voice trembled with emotion, he’d never sounded more clear. “One day with you is worth a lifetime with anyone else, Slim.”
“You can’t say things like that.”
At this point, I was begging him to stop. My heart was beating so fast, it felt like I was seconds away from a very real heart attack. It hurt too much. Everything about this moment hurt too much.
“But it’s all true. If this is the last night I have with you, I’m not wasting anymore breath lying about how I feel about you.” Ethan shook his head in awe, and I felt the words that were coming next in his delicate touch and in the way my heart screamed out in panic. “Alice, I love—”
“ No ,” I cut him off, pressing my forehead to his. “Not now,” I breathed. “I wouldn’t survive you saying that to me now.”
Silent seconds passed by before Ethan nodded his head against mine, and my desperate heartbeat simmered.
And then he said, “But I do.”
It was then that the first tear of the night slipped through.
My heart squeezed the tear out and another after that.
There simply wasn’t enough room for all of these tears left inside of me.
The harrowing ache in my chest had extended out into every inch of me with Ethan’s words, leaving no room for tears or hidden truths. Both poured out of me at the same time.
Sniffing and swiping a tear away, I said, “I do, too.”
There had never before been such a depressing expression of love. Telling someone you loved them—even without saying the words—was supposed to be a happy thing, but Ethan was even more hopeless than before as he watched tear after tear run down my face.
“Slim,” he called my name, sorrow dripping down the singular syllable. Then, we were moving. I kept my legs around him as he lifted us up, both of his arms folded around me until my back touched the sheets on my bed, Ethan’s body coming down on top of me.
“I don’t want you to cry tonight.”
His breath kissed beneath my ear right before his lips did. I half gasped, half sobbed at the feeling, but he didn’t stop there. He traced my body with his lips, peppering in slow, soft kisses along my neck, both shoulders, my collarbone—really anywhere he could reach.
I laid there, staring up at the ceiling of my childhood with tears leaking down the sides of my face while the great love of my life said goodbye to me and to us in the only way he knew how.
“I’m sorry I can’t stop crying.” I rested my hands on the back of his head, folding pieces of his curly hair over my fingers again. “It just hurts.”
Against my neck, Ethan murmured, “What hurts?”
“Loving you. Loving you hurts like… like a seed planted in the ground that never gets watered. It’s there, and it’s got so much potential to be big and beautiful and everlasting, but instead…
it dies before it ever gets a chance to bloom.
It’s desperate for water and life, but it dies lonely and starved of the one thing it needs to survive. ”
“Alice…”
“I just want to love and be loved without the pain,” I whispered, my broken heart bleeding through.
Ethan’s hair tickled my chin as he moved his head to look at me, his face as heartbreaking and as beautiful as anything else about this night.
“The pain is what makes the good parts worth it.”
Falling quiet for a moment, I dragged the tips of my fingers along the smooth edge of his jaw, wishing for the rough stubble of a beard he and I both liked.
I walked my fingers up from his chin to his bottom lip, relishing in how soft and kissable it was.
We were both quiet as I did this, Ethan letting me touch him and memorize him for however long I needed.
Eventually, I had to ask. “Do you think this is worth it?”