Pursing his lips, he looks me up and down, measuring me for what, I don’t know. “Well, you’re here, so I have a question.”
“Hit me,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest.
It’s possible that I know he likes it when I show off my muscles, and it’s also possible that I’m ever-so-slightly flexing my muscles at him. I may be an ogre, but I’m not a stupid ogre.
“Do you even know why I made you leave the other day?”
I smile, relieved to be able to talk about this. “I didn’t at the time, but I have a pretty good guess now.”
“Yeah?” He stares at his hands, a sad slant to his lips.
Walking over to him, I take his hands, kissing his knuckles one at a time.
“My favorite thing was kissing your collarbones. I know it’s weird, but they’re my favorite part of your body. So, when I knew I had to go, I’d kiss them to give me something sweet to remember.”
He stays quiet for a moment, then says, “I used to hate it when you did that. Because it meant you were leaving. You could put an egg timer on it: we’d blow, you’d lay the sweetest kisses on my neck and collarbone, then make some excuse to fuck off and leave.”
He finally looks up at me, and what I wouldn’t do to remove the profound sadness in his eyes.
“So when you started your little I’m-going-to-leave-now ritual, I couldn’t…god, I cou-couldn’t just let it play out. I had to take back some kind of control.”
We stand there in the living room, eyes locked on each other. Nearly swaying in time with one another.
“I wasn’t trying to leave, I promise. Not this time.”
“Okay.”
“Do you know why your collarbones are my favorite?”
He hugs himself, shaking his head.
“I like kissing your collarbones because it lets me hear you breathing.”
He narrows his eyes at me. “It lets you hear mebreathing?”
I answer him softly. “Knowing that I made you breathe hard, knowing that I took your breath away…it always did something to me.Doessomething to me.”
His eyes go to the window and look out over the terraced vineyard. “That’s sweet, I guess. But it took me a hell of a long time to get over you, and I don’t wanna put myself through that again. I can’t have you running off like a scared child, taking my heart with you. I won’t survive it.”
My breath catches and something like hope flares in my chest.
“I know that you have no reason to believe me, but I was a different person back then. I was still heavily influenced by my family, and it was…” I trail off, not sure how to talk about something that doesn’t sound like much, unless you’re forced to live through it day after day.
How could I possibly explain how corrosive it was to endure the daily comments, the snide looks, the ever-present awareness that I was my father’s biggest disappointment? That, in the end, it felt violent as a fist and just as destructive. How it ate away at my sense of self every day…until I was little more than a tuning fork for my father’s emotions, trying so hard to guess what I could possibly do to be enough. And getting it wrong every time.
How the good days somehow made it worse because I knew that the other shoe would eventually drop.
I swallow and try to refocus on my goal. After a few beats, I land on the simple truth.
“Let’s just say I had it in my mind that trying to build a family was just the stupidest, most painful thing someone could willingly do to themselves. I for damn sure knew I couldn’t expect love, affection, or anything remotely approaching acceptance. And if those things did magically appear? They were conditional. Always.”
The hardwood creaks under my heavy boots and my breath is loud in my ears. Unable to help myself, I slide a glance in Ronan’s direction. He’s assessing me, his brows pinched together. Just as I’m convinced that I’ve royally screwed any chance I have with him, a tear spills over his lower lashes and he rubs his chest, nodding to himself as much as to me.
“I kind of know what you mean,” he says quietly. “Like not being fully convinced your parental units truly love you. It’s awful.”
I let out a big breath. “Exactly. But…no bruises, so…”
“No one thinks it’s real.” His eyes shine with sadness and understanding.
