10. Caroline #2
“And this. Us.” Now that it’s started I can’t dam it.
“Maybe it isn’t even real. Maybe it’s just proximity and a bad week and my brain grabbing the nearest comfort it can find.
You were there. You were kind. You showed up when no one else did, and maybe I’ve confused gratitude for something bigger because I’ve never had anyone be kind to me without wanting something back.
Maybe I’m using you as a weapon against Graham and I’m too far inside it to even see that’s what I’m doing, and you deserve so much better than being someone’s weapon. ”
“Is that what you think this is?”
His voice is quiet, controlled, but there’s something under it that stops me cold. He’s pulled the car to the curb. Killed the engine. He’s sitting very still, both hands locked on the wheel like he’s holding himself in place by force.
“Sean.”
“No.” He turns, and his face takes the breath out of me. Raw. Wounded. Furious like I’ve never once seen on him. “You don’t get to file me under your revenge and then call it an accident you stumbled into.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“I’ve waited for you for three years. Three years of watching you shrink yourself for a man who never deserved a minute of you.
Three years of staying away because I told myself it was the decent thing.
And the first week I finally get to have you, the first time I get to know what it is to wake up with you actually in my arms, you want to call it proximity.
A bad week. A warm body that happened to be close. ”
He’s out of the car before I can reach him, walking off down the sidewalk, leaving me alone with my heart slamming and the cold understanding of exactly what I just did.
I hurt him. I was so deep in my own doubt that I never once thought about how the words would sound coming at him, what it does to a man to hear the woman he waited years for call the whole thing a coping mechanism.
I fumble the door open and go after him.
“Sean.”
He doesn’t slow. Doesn’t turn.
“Sean, wait. Please.”
Something in how it cracks finally stops him. He stands with his back to me, shoulders rigid, the tension coming off him in waves.
“I’m sorry.” I close the distance and reach for his arm. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it the way it landed.”
“Then what did you mean?” He turns, and the hurt in his face puts an ache straight through my chest. “Because from where I’m standing it sounds like you’ve already got one foot out the door. Like you’re talking yourself out of this ahead of time so it won’t hurt as much when you go.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No.” I step in closer, making him look at me. “I’m terrified, Sean. Everything I believed about my own life turned out to be a lie. My husband. My sister. My parents. The ground I stood on for twenty-seven years just isn’t there anymore, and I don’t know how to trust anything I’m standing on now.”
“Including me.”
“Including myself.” I lift my hands to his face, holding his jaw, my fingers shaking against his stubble.
“I don’t know how to just be chosen and believe it.
Everyone I’ve ever loved made me earn the right to be kept.
What if I never learn how to stop bracing for you to figure out I’m not worth it? ”
Something in his face gives. The fury drains out and leaves behind something softer and far more exposed.
“You think I don’t have the same fear running under everything?
” His hands come up to cover mine. “That you’ll wake up one morning and see what everyone else has always seen.
The man who was good enough to stand next to Graham and never good enough to be the one anyone actually chose.
The one who’s never made a single thing last.”
“That’s not true.”
“Every morning I wake up next to you, I wait for it. For the day you look at me and the shine comes off.” His voice fractures right down the middle. “You’re the first person who ever looked at me and saw more than that. And the thought of watching you stop.”
I stare at him, this man who turned a boat into a storm for me, who remembers the coffee and the hangers and the dreams I mentioned once at a dinner six months ago, standing on a sidewalk telling me he’s as scared as I am.
And I understand, all at once, that I’ve been so braced for him to hurt me that I never once considered I could be the one doing the hurting.
That he could lie awake with the same math running, the same ledger, the same certainty that he’s about to be set down somewhere and left.
“I think we’re both standing here,” I say slowly, “waiting for the other one to prove we were right not to hope.”
“Yeah.” It comes out rough. “I think we are.”
“I don’t want to do that.” My hands are still on his face.
People flow around us on the sidewalk, a man with a dog, a woman with grocery bags, the ordinary traffic of a city that has no idea two people are coming apart and back together in the middle of it.
“I’ve spent my whole life waiting to be left.
Bracing for it. Making myself small enough that it wouldn’t hurt as much when it came.
And it came anyway, Sean. Every time. The bracing never once saved me. ”
“So stop bracing.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Then we learn it together. Badly, probably. With me saying the wrong thing and you talking yourself into a corner and both of us scared out of our minds.” His thumbs move over the backs of my hands.
“But together. Not you managing me and not me protecting you. Just two people who are bad at this, getting better.”
“You’re not going to lose me.”
“Then tell me it’s real.”