Holden
Chapter Thirty-Five
Ipace across the town square in the dark, talking to myself. Every once in a while, I catch myself closing my eyes while I walk, just like I used to in college, so I can focus my thoughts. Every minute or two, I pause and stare at Lizette’s place, then resume pacing.
There’s still a light on, so it’s not too late to walk across the street and tell her my truth.
“You can do this. You have to do this,” I mutter.
“Do what?”
Startled, my eyes jolt open, and I yelp. Very manly.
“Hell, Lizette! I didn’t know you were there. You scared me.”
“You would have seen me if your eyes were open. Just sayin’.” The hint of a smile teases at the corners of her mouth, and it gives me hope that she’s ready to talk. “You’ve been pacing and staring at my place for almost half an hour.”
I grasp the back of my neck. It’s now or never.
“We need to talk, and you weren’t ready to do it the other night,” I remind her. “Then tonight at your practice cooking lesson and dinner, it felt like there was tension between us again. Like when you first got to Aron Falls.”
She looks to the side. “Yeah, I needed time to process. It isn’t every day you find out you traded your body and soul, sacrificed your heart, for a lie.”
Something pinches in my chest at the reminder of the price she paid, thinking she had no choice.
I rake a hand through my hair. I don’t know what to do that might help her.
“I’m nervous,” I say. She frowns. “I have things I need to say, and I’m worried about how you’ll feel about them. They still need to be said, though.”
She takes a deep breath and looks like she’s expecting the worst.
“All right. I’ll be quiet so you can speak. I’ll try really hard not to interrupt.”
I nod and swallow past the lump in my throat.
“Losing you a decade ago remains one of the worst experiences of my life. Back then, a lot of things came into play, and yes, we were young, but I knew you were it for me.”
She opens her mouth to say something. I lift my eyebrows as a gentle reminder that she was going to avoid cutting in, and she stops herself.
“What I did to hurt you was bad. It was horrible, and I’ll likely never forgive myself for it.”
A slight frown mars her beautiful face, but she remains quiet.
“I should have fought for you, and I didn’t.
Not after the night we talked at that party, and you told me you chose him.
After that, I gave up on us. Then, after the holiday break, I came back to school realizing what a fool I’d been.
I missed you so damn much. But Landon had graduated, and you were gone.
You changed your phone number. You disappeared, but I shouldn’t have left it there, and I did. I’ve regretted that for years.”
I swallow hard.
“The thing is, after you arrived in town, it didn’t take long at all for my heart to remember how I feel about you.
How I’ve always felt about you. And I would be a fool not to tell you I want to be with you.
I want more. I want you and Simon in my life.
I want a second chance at what we lost, but this time, I want us both to be more open and willing to fight for us. ”
I pause for a second, and she must assume I’m done.
“Is that all?” she asks.
I wish.
“Unfortunately, no.”
She breaks eye contact and looks off to the side. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath in, then releases it and opens her eyes again.
“Truthfully, I’m afraid to hear what I think might come next. But I probably need to hear you out. I think I owe us at least that much.”
“Okay.” I look around. “Simon is still at his grandmother’s, right?” She nods.
“There’s a sidewalk that runs around the edge of the square. We could walk or sit on a bench. Or, if you want, there’s a small lake with public access about five minutes from here. We could go there.”
“That would be okay. The lake, I mean.”
We walk in silence to my car. I open the door for her, and when she’s seated, I make sure she’s buckled in, then I go around to the driver’s side and climb in myself.
We don’t say a word the entire trip to the lake, and I’m wondering if that’s a bad sign, an omen of how this is going to go.
When we get there, I grab a blanket from the back of my car in case she wants to sit close to the water. I see her glance at it, and something flashes in her eyes.
“I carry it here in case I ever get stranded in the cold. You’re supposed to do that,” I explain.
“It’s fine,” she whispers.
I decide to test the waters.
“Did your mind go to thinking I had it in here for moments like this with other people?”
She casts her gaze downward and responds with a subtle nod.
“That’s not why. I promise.”
“Okay.”
We walk to a spot by the water and find a flat place close enough that we can see the lake, but not so close that the mosquitoes will be at their worst.
I sit with my legs extended, my palms flat on the ground just behind my shoulders to hold me upright. Lizette has her knees pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. She smooths her palms over her jeans once before clasping her hands tighter around her legs.
She looks vulnerable, biting at her lower lip, her eyes hooded.
I hate that she’s worried.
“Do you want to say anything before I tell you my stuff? Maybe tell me what you’ve heard about me?”
Damn, that’s hard to ask.
She doesn’t answer immediately, but then, to her credit, she lifts her head and looks me in the eye.
“I’ve heard that you’re a playboy. Also, that you get around a lot and that you never see somebody more than three times, even if you like them. That’s weird, by the way. I’ve heard that...” She stares off toward the water. “I’ve just heard that it’s a lot.”
I blow out a breath. Here goes.
“I guess that’s a starting point then. I’m gonna tell you how I’ve been, but then I want a chance to tell you why before you make me take you home.”
“Oh, great. That doesn’t make me less worried about how bad it’s going to be.” She turns to look at me. “You don’t have to tell me this. I’m not sure what my reaction will be. I don’t know if it’s something I’ll be able to cope with, so if you don’t want to take that chance, I get it.”
It’s an out. One I would love to take but can’t. Not if I want this.
“I told you I’m going to fight for us now, and I meant it.
The first battle is probably going to be one of the most difficult, but I’m not backing down.
If there’s any hope for a second chance and you need to know details of my past to be comfortable, then I think I should lay it out there in the open. ”
“Yeah. You’re probably right.”
“One more thing. I swear to you, if we were together, there would never be anyone else. Not ever. I promise.”
She nods slowly. “I don’t trust easily. I struggle when things are out of my control, so I think I need to know.”
“Okay. Yes, I have a reputation as a man who’s not looking for commitment and is fine just hooking up with a woman. It’s not nearly as much as everybody thinks, and not for the reasons they assume, but there have been several times in the last ten years. “
I watch her face, trying to gauge what she’s thinking, but she’s holding her cards close to her chest now, and I can’t tell.
“Go on,” she says, softly.
“It only ever happened when I was really hurting and needed to escape the feelings for a little while. It was mostly when I was out of town working with our West Coast log home division.”
A single tear slips from her eye and trails down her cheek. It pains me more to see it than if she were outright sobbing. I suspect she’s holding in all that she’s feeling, and this is the lone evidence of how hard that likely is.
On instinct, I lift my hand to wipe her cheek, but she puts a palm up to stop me. She wipes it herself.
“Where else?” she asks softly.
I frown. “Where else?”
“Where else have you met the women?”
This part worries me because this is where trust would have to come into play in the future.
“I mean, work conferences, too, sometimes.” I study her to see if I should go on. She simply nods. “This part is going to be the really hard part.”
“That wasn’t the hard part?” she asks. Her breathing speeds up. “Jeez.” She glances at me. “Go ahead.”
“Before I met you, I had only been with my high school girlfriend, Ruby. And when I met you, it had been a few years since that. I wasn’t with anyone else until that night at the frat party.”
I notice she’s biting her lip again, maybe harder this time, worrying it between her teeth.
“It wasn’t your fault at all, but—”
Her eyes dart to mine.
“Wait. Hear me out. When you told me you were choosing him over me, that struck me in the heart.”
“I meant it to,” she whispers.
“I know. You explained you did it to make me not want you, which is the sad thing in all of this, because none of that made me not want you. When we went inside, and you were with Landon, something snapped in me. I only paid that girl attention to start with to make you jealous. Maybe even hurt you a little. And I really didn’t intend for much to happen when we went upstairs.
Honestly, I hadn’t thought past wanting you to see us go to my room.
I was hurting enough that when she started putting her hands on me—”
“I don’t think I want those details.”
“Okay. Sorry. Um, so you know how the next few weeks went before the holiday break. I’m so very sorry for how I behaved. I’m ashamed that I did something intentionally to hurt you.”
She doesn’t speak, but nods.
“Should I continue?” I ask her.
“Did you love any of those women over the years?” she says with a shaky, hushed voice.
“No,” I answer immediately. “Absolutely not. There were a few I was on friendly terms with, but that was it. There wasn’t room for me to love someone else.”
Her eyes find mine, and I watch them search my face.
“Over the years, that’s all it became—an escape when I couldn’t stop the pain I was feeling, both about myself and just life.”
“What do you mean about yourself?”
This is where I’m not sure if I can continue. I hesitate long enough that she’s the one who starts to talk again.
“You don’t have to—”
“No. I need to. I need you to understand me if you’re ever going to trust me to be fully honest.”
“Okay,” she whispers.
I blow out a breath.
“I’ve struggled for a long time with this feeling that I’m not good enough for anyone.
It was probably always there, but it really came out with the breakup with Ruby.
Since then, I’ve struggled to see why someone would choose me over…
over other options. I’ve never known how to make that fully go away. ”
I stare out over the water.
“It’s only fair to tell you I’ve felt broken for a long time. I imagine that could get heavy for someone to put up with and—”
“That’s enough.” There’s an edge to her voice.
My heart races, and my head drops toward my chest. This is going to hurt like hell this time.
“Holden, look at me.” I hesitate, wanting to put off seeing the look on her face. “Please…”
I suck in a breath and lift my head. What I see surprises me.
“You’re not broken.” She takes my hand and squeezes it for a second. “I didn’t see you as broken then, and I don’t now, either.”