19. Show Me #4
"You're the first," I hear myself whisper, and once the sentence starts I find I can't stop the rest of it from coming.
"In five years. You're the first one to make me feel like I could be loved by somebody new.
Appreciated by somebody who wasn't standing at that altar.
Somebody who doesn't owe me an apology to get through the front door.
" My eyes sting hot, and for once I just let them.
"It hasn't even been seventy-two hours. I have a rule about seventy-two hours, Sawyer, an actual ironclad rule, and you blew straight through the middle of it like it was tissue paper.
But you fought for me. You chased me down a black road in the dark and hid me under your own steering wheel and cooked me dinner and put my neutralizer up where I can't reach it.
" A wet, cracking laugh escapes me. "You've done things in one single day that the three men I was going to marry couldn't manage to do in years. "
He doesn't say a word. He just lets me have the whole floor, which is somehow far worse, because it means the rest of it keeps spilling out.
"I thought I was used goods." The word comes out cracked straight down the middle.
"That's the — that's the ugly little sentence that's been living in my chest for five whole years.
Who wants the woman who got left? Who lines up for the leftovers — the reject, the return, the cautionary tale standing there in the nice white dress with nobody at the other end of the aisle?
" I swallow hard around the stone lodged in my throat.
"But then you came out of absolutely nowhere and interfered in my entire life without so much as asking my permission, and somehow the side effect of all your meddling is — they see it now.
All three of them. That I can be wanted.
That I'm not stuck, and I'm not unlovable, and I'm not—" my voice wobbles and drops clean off a cliff to nothing "—I'm still attractive. Apparently. To somebody."
The heat floods my face all the way to the tips of my ears, and I stare down into the sheets, mortified past speech.
He moves.
He crosses it. The demilitarized zone — the line I drew straight down the center of this bed not two hours ago, the border I swore up and down I would defend with my dying breath — he crosses it slow, like it was never truly there.
His hand comes up. His warm palm cradles the side of my face.
His thumb tips my chin up until there is nowhere left on earth for me to look but at him.
"And who," he says, low and rough, "ever told you that you weren't attractive?"
The magnolia in his scent has opened all the way now, warm and dark and blooming, the aged bourbon underneath it deepening into something that curls hot and low in my belly.
The black pepper's gone knife-sharp over the top of it — restraint, I understand dimly through the haze, the unmistakable scent of a big man holding his whole self on a very short leash.
"Well," I manage, and it comes out mortifyingly breathless. "It was a — a personal assessment. Internal review. Annual, actually. I'm my own harshest—"
"Mm." His thumb drags slow and deliberate along my bottom lip, coaxing it to part, and every single clever thing I have ever known in my life evacuates my skull at once.
"And what," he murmurs, so quiet I feel it more than hear it, "would it take, do you think, to enlighten you otherwise?
To make you believe — really, truly believe it, down in the marrow — that you are attractive, Amber, and that you can be loved by somebody altogether new? "
I am scarlet. I can feel the whole tomato-red truth of it blazing under the warmth of his palm.
Maybe it's the wine, loosening the knots I keep tied so cruelly tight.
Maybe it's the ungodly hour. Maybe it's the long dry year of empty evenings I filled up with a grape instead of a person.
Maybe it's every single bit of it braided together.
This could be the moment. The one I have never once let myself have.
I haven't signed a thing yet — not the federal papers, not the terms with the three of them, nothing's inked, nothing binds me till the sun's up.
If I try this — try him — tonight, and it turns out wrong, there is still a door.
There is always a door. I count the exits in every room for a living.
But God help me, I don't want the door right now. I want, for one reckless stolen hour, to find out what it feels like to be chosen by a man who chose me on purpose. When nobody made him. When there was no altar, no contract, no father in the wings pulling the strings tight.
I swallow the stone in my throat. My hand comes up, and it closes around his wrist — not to pull it away from my face. To keep it exactly where it is.
"Show me?" I whisper.
It's a dare. It's a plea. It's the bravest thing I've said out loud in five long years, all of it folded down small into two little words.
Let me find out that I'm desirable. Let me find out that I'm loveable.
Let me find out I don't have to stay stuck forever with men who never once, not one time, went over and beyond for me — that better exists in this world, and that I am allowed to reach out and want it.
I hold his dark, steady, patient gaze, and I say it.
"Show me that you can do better."