6. All You Can Eat #4
"But even knowing that, I wasn't ready for you.
" Her voice got smaller. "I wasn't ready to choose you.
And I think that's what made you so angry.
You wanted me to jump, out of six years with a man who had my mind twisted up, straight into you, same night.
And when I couldn't, when I needed time, you put a clock on it—"
"Ru—" I tried to push in because I wasn't in the mood for games.
"Because the longer I sat in my mama's house, the more I understood. The better I deserved was never just leaving Asher. It was you. It was always you.”
I reached across the counter and took her hands.
They were small and shaking inside mine as I tried to make sense of everything pouring out of her.
I tried to figure out if I was hearing it wrong, if maybe I'd fallen asleep at that counter waiting for her to get out the shower and this was some fever dream I hadn't woke up from yet.
But the words just kept coming, one on top the other, and I kept drinking them down like a man who'd been thirsty longer than he wanted to admit.
"But tonight," she wouldn’t stop, "I realized I was already losing you.
That not choosing all these years was choosing.
" Her nails dug into my palms. "So I drove in that storm.
Got on that ferry terrified. And I came here to tell you I'm done being scared.
Done standing in front of the tree with my hands at my sides telling myself there's time.
There isn't. There's only this summer. There's only you.
There's only right now before our season is over… "
Her eyes locked on mine and everything was in them. Seven years of waiting. Four months of work. A whole lifetime of ripening happening right in front of me.
"Before our friendship is truly over and we can't walk back from this. Before…we could could be what we've always known we're destined to be."
I pulled her around the counter before my brain caught up to my body. Moved on her like a starving man who just smelled food. My hands found her face, tilted it up.
"You understand what you're saying right now?" It came out of me broken in places I didn't know were still breakable.
"I do."
I stepped back, hands coming off her face like pulling them off a hot pan. It felt like every burner on my station was lit and I had nobody working the pass. Orders stacking up faster than I could plate them, ticket after ticket, and I didn't know what to reach for first.
"You want me to just jump." I could hear my own voice changing, the hurt climbing up through it.
"'Cause you ready now? 'Cause you got four months to sit in your mama's house and do the work, on your clock, your terms, your therapist, your peace, and now you show up on my porch and I'm supposed to what?
" I threw a hand toward the ceiling before I could stop it.
"Forget I got somebody upstairs? Somebody who ain't done nothing wrong but not be you? "
"Dillion—"
"Dillion nothing." Thunder cracked right on top of it like the sky was co-signing. "This some bullshit, Ru. You don't get to heal on mute and then hit me with a countdown. 'Reach now or I'm on the first boat.' That's a deadline, Aurelia. You came in a storm to hand me back my own deadline."
"What did you want me to do, Dillion? Jump out of one relationship straight into your arms so you could feel like the hero?" Her eyes were blazing now, wet and furious at once. "So you could finally collect? Seven years of deposits and you wanted your payout, is that it?”
"Collect?" I laughed, and it didn't sound like a laugh. It sounded like something tearing. "I don't want you owing me nothing. I wanted you safe. I wanted you to want me the way I been wanting you since you walked into my kitchen soaking wet with the wrong damn order."
"I would have hurt you."
"You hurt me anyway!" Lightning threw her face white for half a second, tears and all.
"You been hurting me, Ru! Every day for four months you didn't call, you was hurting me.
Every year I watched you go home to a man who couldn't spell your name right if his life depended on it, you was hurting me.
When we made love and then I had to act like it didn't happen, 'cause that's what you wanted? That was hurting me."
She flinched like I'd hit her with something heavier than words. She didn't say anything for a long moment. Just stood there in that nightgown, chest rising and falling like she'd run here from Westonberry instead of riding a ferry through hell.
"You gon' just stand there? Or you gon' say something?"
"What do you want me to say, Dillion?" All the fight bled out of her voice and left something rawer underneath. "You want me to apologize for being scared? For needing time to unlearn six years of settling? I can't give you that. I won't."
"I ain't ask for an apology."
"Then what do you want?" She took a step toward me and my whole body went still. "Tell me right now. What do you want from me?"
The rain kept coming. And somewhere above us, a floorboard creaked, one slow note through the ceiling, and my eyes went up before I could stop them, and hers followed, and for a second we both just stood there under it.
Madeline. Turning over. Or standing at a door.
Or sitting on the top stair in the dark with her arms around her knees, and God forgive me, I didn't go check, because the woman in front of me had her heart sitting out on her face for the first time in seven years and I could not make myself leave the room it was in.
Everything careful I'd built since February, the distance, the discipline, the woman upstairs I'd been telling myself might be enough, all of it went quiet at once. Like a dining room when the lights come up. Service over.
"I want you to stop making me guess. I want you to stop giving me pieces of you and then taking it back.
That's what I want. Seven years, Ru. Seven years of reading your face like a recipe, figuring out what you need before you say it, 'cause you never just say it.
The ferry, the phone calls, the two a.m. pickups, I did all of it off inference.
Loved you seven whole years in a language you never once confirmed I was speaking. "
My hands opened at my sides, showing her how empty they were without her to hold.
"I'm tired of translating you, Aurelia. Say it or don't. But I'm done guessing."
"So translate this."
She closed the last of the distance, until the heat coming off her skin reached me before she did.
"I love you. Not like a friend. Not like somebody who catches me when I fall. I have loved you since you made me tagliatelle in the back of your kitchen with rain still in my shoes, and I have been lying to both of us every day since, because the truth was too big to hold with both hands."
My chest hurt in a way no bourbon has ever touched.
"Say it again." Barely sound.
"I love you, Dillion Duckworth the Third."
Thunder rolled, less like an argument this time. More like something settling into its foundation. And I had one card left. One true thing still standing between us, and I put it on the table face up.
"I got somebody upstairs." It didn't come out like a warning. It came out like a confession. Like the last locked room in the house opening from the inside.
"I know." Her eyes never left mine.
We just stood there. Staring. Tears cutting clean lines down her face.
Tears standing in my eyes that I willed back the way I'd willed back everything all those years, one more act of inventory control.
The rain hammered the roof. Thunder rolled in again, singing something older than both of us.
Lightning threw her face white and gone.
My heart wasn't beating right. It was just sitting high in my throat like it had climbed up there for a better look at her.
There was a woman upstairs.
A good woman. An honest one. A woman who'd asked me for the real me all week and gotten ice cream instead.
I thought about her. Didn't forget her, didn't misplace her somewhere convenient in my own head.
I stood in that kitchen and thought about Madeline Dubois upstairs in my bed, waiting for me to make her fly, and I understood with total clarity what I was about to cost her, and what it made me, and that I would spend a long time paying for what I was about to do.
I decided, the same way I'd decided in that parking lot. I was going to pay it.
"Stone fruit, right?" My voice came out low, rough, barely mine. "You don't take it when it's ready, it's gone."
She nodded, once, tears still falling, her fingers pressing flatter against my chest.
I pulled her to me as lightning brightened the sky then went dark again.
She came easy, no resistance anywhere in her, and when my mouth found hers the thunder cracked directly overhead, close enough to rattle the windows in their frames, close enough to feel in the floor, like the storm had been circling this house all night waiting on exactly this and could finally quit.
She made a sound against my lips, something between a sob and a sigh, and I swallowed it whole.
I kissed her like a man who'd run out of road. My hands in the damp hair at her nape, her body coming up against mine like it had the blueprint, like that one night together had never stopped being load-bearing, and every careful thing in me let go of the wheel at the same time.
"I fucking love you," I said against her mouth, breathless, barely pulling back far enough to shape it before I was kissing her again. "You know that? Seven years, Ru. Seven years. You know that."
She nodded into me, couldn't find her words, just clung, fingers fisted in my shirt like the floor had begun tottering under her, as if she thought I might change my mind if she let go.