54. NINEAH
NINEAH
HE SMELLED LIKE SIN.
Warm skin. Georgia sunlight. Barbecue smoke. And engine oil.
He looked better.
And I’d lied through my teeth. I wasn’t a good girl.
I was a new single mom, tired of private school dropoffs where divorced dads with soft hands and anemic personalities proffered play dates as an opener to the worlds’ most boring small talk.
Short of making it clear that I’d sooner eat their ex-wives until my lips chapped than let them torture me over a sixty-dollar steak, I’d weaseled my way out of so much male attention lately, it’d exacerbated just how screwed up over him I was.
Most days, parenting kept me too exhausted to miss him.
I’d spent much of the last month settling into my new role as a mother, learning Miracle’s needs, patterns, interests, dislikes, and even her shortcomings.
There was so much love there—too much if I was being honest. Most days I barely felt worthy of her wide-eyed trust and every day since she’d come home, I’d worn my heart outside my chest.
Still.
When I laid awake at night, I could almost smell him on the sheets.
In the walk-in closet. The shower… Some days, I’d pass his study and get this jolt to my body that I’d come to realize was an old memory trapped behind a damaged hippocampus and a heartbreak that felt so similarly to the guilt I still hadn’t found a way to move past. And in such close proximity to him now, I was so, so weak I floated in his orbit like one of those self-sacrificing moths that wanted two minutes of hang-time in the pretty glow of a lamplight.
The barbecue was winding down now as guests packed to-go plates and headed home.
The kids, who were full of too much food had settled in the living room to watch movies with Baby while Abraham’s father, Israel carried heavy trash bags to the bins.
Lingering in the kitchen, pretending like I wasn’t thinking of how his too-warm palm had grasped my hip in a way that made my pussy thump harder than my heart rate, I watched him scrub out casserole dishes because I was a fucking weirdo. Why change that now, I guess.
“Not interested in Princess and The Frog?” he asked, setting a dutch oven in the drying rack. He didn’t turn to look at me.
Embarrassed by my body’s reaction in such an inappropriate setting, I cleared my throat. “As much as I love watching good things happen to people who aren’t me, I think I’ll sit this one out.”
He snorted.
A lengthy silence passed while he washed, dried, and put things away.
The symphonic arrangement of splashing water and opening drawers making me anxious, I felt it.
The fast-growing urge to blurt out more things I shouldn’t.
The last time I’d done that, Abraham hadn’t had a response and I’d spent the following weeks wishing I was the kind of person who knew shame because though I hadn’t regretted my honesty, I’d regretted ambushing him with it when I should’ve just respected his need for space.
And now here I was, still riding that boundary line.
“Go ahead,” I murmured, unable to stand in such charged silence.
“Hm?”
“Tell me I’m insane.”
Abraham tore his attention away from the dishes and looked at me. His stare fixated on my mouth briefly before meeting my gaze. “For what? Adopting a child?”
I nodded.
His smile surprised me. I’d seen Abraham smirk, frown, even laugh. But I’d never seen him smile. Not really. My heart sprinted. “On the contrary,” he said. “You’ve never handled your decisions lightly. Not even your impulsive ones.”
His vote of confidence was so validating, I wanted to cry but I swallowed down the emotion. “I saw what you did. In the backyard, I mean. That day at the house, when you claimed you’d come to pack the study… That wasn’t why you were there.”
“No,” he admitted.
I’d walked the property one day to test the alarm system and that was when I’d stumbled across the small stepping stone, hidden behind a thick brush of foliage. It’d been engraved with a date and a tiny footprint.
I still couldn’t explain the sudden warmth that’d broken the gloomy sky or the whistle of wind that’d caressed my cheek just then, but as if my heart refused to forget, an intense wave of loss hit and I’d cried at that stone for over an hour before returning home.
The next day, I’d booked an appointment with a therapist because grief wasn’t simple.
I’d more than made peace with my fucked up genetics a long time ago, not just accepting that I’d never have a viable pregnancy, but that I didn’t want one either.
Even still, I was responsible for grieving the choice I’d never gotten to make, the man and the memories I’d lost, and the eight years Miracle spent waiting for me to find her.
If I didn’t, I’d never be able to show up for my kid the way she needed. I’d never be able to heal myself.
Staring at my ex-husband, afraid if I took my eyes off of him he might disappear for another nine months, I opened my mouth to speak but no words came out.
Thankfully, he interrupted. “I don’t know if I should be suspicious or annoyed that you look and smell like this at a family function you didn’t even think I’d be attending. ”
“Well in the off chance your mother was mistaken…” I shrugged. Shaking his head, he returned to the dishes. “I miss you,” he said, casually. Unfortunately for me, my brain interpreted those three words as anything but and my body went haywire.
Don’t make this weird. Don’t make this weird.
“That’s… understandable. I imagine you lead a very noise-free life without me.”
“And what kind of life do you lead?”
“A good one,” I answered honestly. Glancing at Miracle, afraid to meet the stare of a man I spent the better part of nine months dreaming about, I crossed my arms over my body. “But you know, good is… hard to acclimate to when you know better exists.”
Pausing at the sink, he forced an exhale through his nostrils.
Not in irritation, but resignation. Like he was coming to the very realization I had months ago—that for the same reasons we’d parted, we couldn’t fully detach.
The wires that linked us were complicated, yet inextricable.
When you tugged one, the rest pulled, and no matter how hard we tried to cut them, the steel refused to sever because the promises we’d made to one another in a gun range armory had been more than spoken declarations that bound as far as the legal agreement held.
I’d probably watched our wedding video hundreds of times over the last nine months. Noted the resolute conviction in those people who’d spoken their oaths, sealed them in ink, then sealed them in love.
I could agree that I didn’t deserve Abraham, but I didn’t need memory to tell me what I knew—I loved him. I loved him so much, I was willing to give him up but he had to say the words first.
“I didn’t leave because you lied or because I was upset with you.”
Tearing my gaze from the living room, I found him staring at me. Tall, terribly imposing, his intensity no longer made anxiety swirl in my abdomen. Only longing. And regret. I moved in closer. Just a step. “I know.”
“I am not you,” he said. “Every decision I make, every decision is anticipatory. It’s preventative measure. It’s to mitigate consequences before they happen because the day I met you I suddenly had a reason to be afraid. I’m sure you can appreciate that now, having a reason of your own.”
This time, I couldn’t help the tremor in my lips. I swiped at a tear before it fell and nodded.
“Your fearlessness doesn’t scare me, Nineah.
It terrifies me,” he admitted. “You said that you’re not good for me, but the truth is, I don’t see how I can be good for you, knowing I will always be trying to curtail that part of you and we both know you couldn’t change it if you wanted.
So, that’s where I’m at right now. Do you see my problem? ”
“I do,” I whispered.
“Those are my choices,” he said. “Fear in perpetuity or perpetual regret.”
I wet my lips. “That’s fucked up.”
“It’s very fucked up.”
Soundtrack music blared from the television sound system.
My heart beat as loud as the bass. “And yet… you haven’t asked me to leave.
You didn’t at the house and you didn’t today.
You let me dance on the boundary line because you like to watch.
” Reaching into that bravery he hated so much, I took two more steps into his space until I could feel his body heat.
“But what would you do if I stopped dancing? Are you not more afraid of that?”
His jaw tensing, the dark set of his eyes reminding me of the man who’d literally crossed the earth for me twice, he walked into the trap. “Is that a threat?”
“It’s a question.”
He glared.
I waited.
His hands refusing to obey him, they found either side of my face and held me like that.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t kiss me. He just stared like he was trying to make an impossible situation bend to his will, but the truth was, sometimes the decision was simple—a bad choice over a worse one.
And this one, I couldn’t make for him. For us.
“Look, I’m aware how shitty it is of me to stand here and make demands of you like I’ve earned that right, but I have more than myself to consider now,” I explained. “And I… I need clearly drawn lines. For her sake. So if you really can’t—”
Cutting me off with his mouth, his tongue sliding deep, all in the space of one breath, he kissed me, rewriting my code, or maybe erasing it altogether.
I didn’t know. I just knew, in that moment, a nine-month drought crumbled in the wake of human connection and not even my best of intentions stood a chance.
I didn’t give in.
I fucking sank like a torpedoed ship.
Bracing my hands against him, I stole his taste like if I took enough I could save some for later. But almost as quickly as he’d acted, he’d already begun to pull away. The loss was so fucking devastating, I wanted to cry, but then his forehead touched mine. “No.”
“No…?”
“You can’t…” he trailed off like he didn’t even know what he was trying to say, but I got the gist.
It was in his eyes. His hands. His frown.
Raising onto my toes, I kissed him back. “I’m not going anywhere. Never was.”