Chapter 32 #2
He’s looking at me like he gets it, like he understands what I’ve been through, and a hot burst of anger pulses in my throat.
Because he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand what it was like to suffocate under mountains of grief, to feel weighed down with a kind of unbearable heaviness that wouldn’t go away.
Maybe if he did, he would have been there for me when I needed him.
Maybe our marriage wouldn’t have fallen apart.
The thought cuts through me, sharp and painful, a reopened wound. I look away.
“Let’s not talk about this anymore,” I say.
His spine stiffens in response. “What do you need?”
A time machine, I think.
“I don’t know…maybe…” But I let the words trail off. “How about a distraction?” I say instead.
His eyes skip past me to the shoreline. “We could go for a swim? Or a walk on the beach?”
I bite my lip, giving him a heated look. “How about a different kind of distraction?”
His expression shifts; understanding stretches across his features. “You want me to fuck you? Here?”
Static heat curls down the length of my spine. “Please?” I stick my bottom lip out. “I don’t want to think. I just want to forget about what happened.”
It’s true. I want a distraction. Something to lose myself in like I did last night.
But it’s more than that. It’s that I can feel myself needing him.
Wanting things from him that I know I can’t have.
Which is why I need to reestablish what this is.
That it’s about sex. Just sex. The way I told Abby it was.
“There’s a public restroom over there,” I tell him, pointing to the bathroom facility on the other side of the beach. “We haven’t had bathroom sex in a while. Or I bet those palm trees are—”
Liam puts up a hand. “Ros, stop.”
“What? Do you think the palm trees would be too painful?”
“No. It’s not about the palm trees.” He scrapes a sandy hand through his beard. “I know you’re upset right now, and I don’t want to just gloss over it with sex.”
“But I thought that’s what we agreed to?” I say. “Just sex.”
He winces, but when he speaks his voice is gentle. “Ros. I’m not going to fuck you when you’re upset.”
Part of me wants to demand that he do it anyway, that he take me to the bathroom and bend me over the dirty sink and make me come so hard that the lines between hurt and pleasure start to blur, that I forget what Jonah said, that I forget everything.
But it feels a bit like grasping at the fraying edges of an unraveling stitch: much too late.
He pushes out a heavy breath, his eyes shifting to the sand then back to me. “I know I wasn’t good at talking about…” His mouth tenses, and he gestures between us. “Stuff. But I’m here if you want to talk about your mum, if it would help,” he adds, voice softening.
Blood roars in my ears. The sand in my toes suddenly feels like lead.
“It’s too late,” I whisper. “If you wanted to talk, the time was months ago, when I needed you. Not now, Liam.”
His eyes take a determined shape. “You’re right. I fucked up,” he says. “But I want to try. If you’ll let me.”
I want to hold on to my anger. To tell him it’s too late for that.
It’s been too late. That it’s not fair of him to do this to me, not now, not when the end is so close.
But as I search the hollowness of his eyes, the deep lines bracketing his mouth, the collision of shame and regret and determination colliding across his face, I lose my edge.
I think about how he was vulnerable with me the other night, how honest and transparent he was, and I wonder if maybe it’s only fair to give us one last chance to have this conversation. Not just for him, but for me, because I deserve to talk about my mom with someone who is willing to listen.
I fix my gaze on the rise and fall of the tide as it runs up and over my feet.
“I miss her every day,” I tell him, my voice so small it barely comes out.
“What do you miss about her?”
I don’t have to think about my answer. “How resilient she was. Even when life hadn’t been great to her, when people talked about her behind her back, when she got pregnant and the men never stuck around, she always kept her head high.
She kept believing in love. She never stopped seeing the best in people.
” Tears spike my eyes, but I press on. “And her laugh. God, I miss her laugh. I wish I had a recording of it.”
“She had a great laugh,” Liam agrees. “I think that’s the thing I first remember about her.”
“It wasn’t her weird jewelry?”
“That too,” he says, eyes catching the light bouncing off the water. “I remember the first time I met her at your family’s Christmas. She was wearing a pendant with a naked woman on it.”
I reach for her bracelet like it might anchor me to her.
“It’s funny,” I tell him. “I used to be embarrassed by the clothes and the jewelry. But now I’d give anything to hear the jangle of her bracelets, announcing her presence from a mile away. She never cared what anyone thought of her.”
A lump catches in my throat as I think about the time she yelled at another mom in the school parking lot when she found out they wouldn’t let Jonah come over because he was gay.
And the time she made my homecoming dress by hand even though no one asked me to go because she wanted me to have something that sparkles.
She was a passionate woman, someone who loved fully and deeply.
Who lit up every room she entered. But she was also rash and impulsive, and often very selfish.
And I hate that her death is forcing me to grapple with the duality of a woman who was both my best friend and my hero, but also painfully flawed.
“I wish I could only remember the good parts,” I say, trying to swallow down the ache in my throat. “But I can’t untangle those memories from the not-so-great ones. All the times she chose boyfriends over us. All the times we moved because of some new guy. All the times she broke promises.”
Liam leans toward me, taking my hand in his. A part of me wants to fight it, to not need his comfort, to not need him. But as his fingers tangle with mine, gripping just a little too tightly, I wonder if maybe he needs this too. If maybe he needs me as much as I wish I didn’t need him.
“You think you get older, and this stuff won’t matter anymore,” I tell him.
“But I guess you never forget the time your mom disappeared from your tenth birthday party and came back two hours later smelling like rubbing alcohol. Or all the times we had cereal for dinner because she was giving half her paycheck to the guy she was dating.” I shake my head, biting back the painful slew of memories now coursing through me like a dam’s broken loose.
“I know she loved us and was trying her hardest, but…” My voice cracks with an unexpected sob as a tear breaks free.
Liam lifts his hand to brush it away. “Hey,” he says, his voice so soft it hurts. “It’s okay.”
And I know he doesn’t mean it’s okay that she’s dead, or even that it will be okay, but that it’s okay for me to cry, to fall apart.
So I do.
I lean into his damp chest, where he’s warm and solid and sturdy, and I cry. I cry until my throat is sore and my eyes are raw. I cry until I’m no longer sure what I’m even crying for.
Maybe it’s for my mom. Or Liam and me. Or maybe it’s the rapidly approaching deadline between us. That in four days we’ll fly back to Seattle, and this will be over. No more midnight swims. No more flirting. No more sex. No more this.
I try to tell myself it’s okay, this is for the best.
It has to end like this. I always knew that.
But it doesn’t stop the sting of loss. Or the ache in my bones. It doesn’t stop the unbearable crush of want clawing at the walls of my heart.