8. Carve You Out My Chest #2
"March was worse," she said. "Because by then I was trying to convince myself that what happened between us was a mistake.
Just two people who cared about each other getting confused about what that meant.
But I was lying to myself the whole time.
I knew what it meant. I knew because I couldn't eat.
Couldn't sleep. Couldn't look at another man without comparing him to you and finding him lacking.
I'd taste food and think about how you would've made it better.
I'd wake up in the middle of the night reaching for the phone to call you…forced myself not to.”
She shifted against me, pulling herself closer.
"Asher knew something was wrong," she continued.
"He always asked me if I was with you before him.
Wouldn't accept that there were no feelings between us.
And that became harder after the night I…
I slipped. Guilt swallowed me after we made love, but I had to fight what I was feeling for you.
We had to just be best friends. I could play the role.
But I hurt you while doing that, and I'm sorry. "
I didn't realize how badly I needed to hear her apologize for that. Just scrubbed a hand through my beard to distract myself, because I needed to keep quiet and let her keep going. I needed to hear everything, know everything she'd been feeling.
"After he got out, he'd turn up at my mama's, standing on that porch asking what I wanted from him.
What he had to do to make me happy. And all I could think was that nothing he did would ever be enough, because none of it was you.
I was done. Didn't matter how many times he swore he wasn't gonna let what happened keep him away from me. "
"Did you want to go back?" My jaw ticked.
"For about a day," she admitted. "Not because I wanted him.
I need you to know that. It was the guilt.
Guilt has a way of keeping me in rooms I already outgrew, and he knew it.
Always holding up every little thing he ever did for me like a receipt he could cash whenever he felt like it.
But my cousins, Carter and Cartier, told me he never loved me.
Told me not to let the begging fool me. Said if I went back he'd make me pay for leaving, and for what you did to him.
They made me promise not to put them in a position where they'd have to do what you did… and maybe carry it further."
I pressed a kiss into her hair and made a note to sit down with the twins. Thank them for talking sense into her in my absence.
"April I was trying to accept that I'd lost you," she said.
"That by not choosing you, I'd made the choice for both of us.
I ran into you at your mama's fundraiser and it was like seeing a ghost. You were so far away from me even though you were in the same room and I had to stand there trying to act like everything was normal between us and it broke something in me that I'm still trying to put back together. "
The rain intensified. It sounded like the whole sky was falling.
"May I was trying to learn how to be someone who didn't love you," she said. “It was such a blur.”
She lifted her head and looked at me in the dark.
"And then June came," she said. "And tonight I was at my mama's helping her put up peaches.
Whole kitchen full of them, Mama had bought a bushel off a truck, and we're standing there peeling and slicing and sweating over the pot, and Mama's fussing at me because I keep setting aside the ones that are perfectly ripe.
Won't let her can them. And she finally asks me why, and I hear myself say, because these ones are ready now.
It'd be a waste to make them into something that keeps. "
The rain filled the silence as she gathered herself.
"And I stood there with peach juice all over my hands in my mama's kitchen and heard what I'd just said.
Some things aren't supposed to be preserved, Dillion.
Some things are supposed to be eaten in season.
And I'd spent all this titme trying to put us up in jars.
Trying to keep you in a form that would last on a shelf.
The friendship. The in-between. All of it was me canning something that was meant to be taken ripe. "
She reached up in the dark and touched my face.
"Mama watched me stand there holding a peach with my mouth open," she said, "and she just took her apron off and said, 'Go on, then. Ferry runs till nine.'"
I huffed something that was half a laugh and had water in it. Of course Miss Lorna had been standing next to the revelation when it landed. She'd probably been arranging peaches in that kitchen for weeks, waiting.
"So I packed a bag," she said. "And then the storm rolled in, and I sat on the porch with that bag by the door, trying to wait it out like a reasonable woman.
And it wouldn't stop. It just kept coming.
And somewhere around dark I understood it wasn't going to stop, not tonight, maybe not all week, and I thought, that's the whole lesson, isn't it?
There's never a clear day. Never the perfect time to take a risk. You go in the storm or you don't go."
She paused. Her fingers had gone still on my chest.
"But it wasn't even that, really. I could've told myself Friday, Saturday.
" Her voice dropped, and something under it tightened.
"It was this feeling, Dillion. It felt as if something was closing that wasn't going to reopen, and if I sat on that porch one more night being sensible, I was going to arrive at a door that had already closed.
I couldn't shake it. I paced the kitchen till Mama told me I was wearing a road in her floor.
Something in me was ringing like a timer. "
She let out a breath against my chest.
"So I came anyway. In the dark. Crossed the water in the worst of it without you, sick to my stomach…and here we are."
I stared at the ceiling in the dark and did not tell her how right the timer was.
"Here we are," I confirmed.
I pulled her back against my chest and held her like I could make up for four months in one night. Knowing I couldn't. Holding her like that anyway.
"We wasted so much time," she said into my chest. "And hurt Madeline in the process."
"That's on me."
She pulled back enough to look at me. "You didn't know I was coming."
"No. But I brought her out here knowing my heart wasn't available. Packed a woman into a house with a ghost in it and didn't disclose the ghost. That's a choice I made, Ru. Mine to answer for."
The distant lightning moved across her face and I could see the weight sitting on her anyway.
"She hates me."
"Tonight she probably hates us both, and she's got the right. But hear me…this is my mess. I caused this. You're the reason I couldn't love her. You're not the reason I lied to her. Those are different charges, and only one of them has your name on it, and it's the one that ain't a crime."
I slowly ran my hand down her back.
"But if I'd never—"
"If you'd never come, I'd have spent another week lying to a good woman, and married the lie eventually, maybe, and been a polite dead man in a nice house.
" I said it flat. "You didn't wreck something, Aurelia.
You walked in and turned the lights on. Madeline did the same thing standing in that kitchen doorway.
Between the two of you, there's not a dark corner left in me, and I know it don't feel like it right now, but that's a mercy. Ugly ones are still mercies."
She nodded slow, but I could feel her still carrying a share of it.
"Come here," I said, and pulled her back down against my chest.
We lay there. The rain had settled into that steady all-night rhythm, and the wind worked the shutters like it had a grudge it was talking itself out of, and her breathing started to go long against me, and that's when the thing I'd been carrying since the counter finally made it to the front of my mouth.
She must have felt me change underneath her, because she lifted her head. Looked up at me. I watched the question rise in her eyes before her mouth caught it.
"What’s wrong?"
I didn't answer right away. Let the shutters fill the space while I went and got the words, you have to go down and get them from where they've been sitting.
"If you meant everything you said tonight," I said, "you gotta mean it all the way, Ru."
"I can't do the version where the sun comes up and the fear comes back and I get a text explaining why the night didn't count.
I've had you and lost you off one sunrise before.
I lived through it once. I'm telling you plain, I ain’t got it in me to live through it twice.
So if any part of you is still scared, if all this with Madeline is too much, that's all right, be scared. "
Her eyes were shining in the dark, and she didn't look away.
"February, I told you if you came to me, I'd know it.
You ain't come. I lived through that." My voice dropped the way a fire drops right before it dies or catches something bigger.
"Barely, but I lived. I understood now what you were doing.
You were being careful and was a right you had no matter how I felt about it. "
I pulled back far enough to see her whole face. The rain light moved across it, silver, then dark, then silver, like the sky couldn't decide what it wanted her to be.