“I have a life in California.” It was a weak argument because there was nothing holding me to the place. It was another stop on my endless journey to stay hidden. As it turned out, I didn’t even have any true friends there. The last true friend I had was Aimee Horton in college. We lost touch the day that I was whisked away to Greece by my grandmother. Losing her was my next biggest regret after losing Logan. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t bring myself to grieve my father’s passing just yet.
“Logan, if Grace hadn’t stolen from you, would you…” I couldn’t finish my question but a part of me needed to get it all out and to be done with our past.
“That night, before I saw you when Grace showed up at my place, I wondered what I was waiting for. I’d been waiting for you while not knowing if you were only planning to marry me because I was a better option than all the goons your father had in mind or if you had real feelings. We didn’t see one another a lot. She was there. I had so many doubts and frustrations burning through my mind all the time back then. Grace made herself into exactly what I needed at the time. She was available, interested, and didn’t hold back. I know it makes me sound like an asshole, and isn’t something you probably want to hear, but I had made up my mind that night that I needed to stop waiting to be your escape plan and start living for me. At least for a while. I never intended not to honor my promise to you, though.”
“Yeah?” I asked as a half-assed laugh followed the one-word question. “How would you have painted that picture? If you were in a real relationship with Grace, or some other girl, and then suddenly you had to marry me to save me from the mafia, how would that have worked?”
“I don’t know, Aoife. I didn’t have all the answers. I just knew that I was fucking lonely and she gave me the things I was missing. We were still so young and long distance relationships are hard enough, but we weren’t even in one. We were only ever friends with the promise and intention of one day being more. One day seemed pretty fucking far away in that moment. Would I have dated Grace if she hadn’t been using me to steal my work? Yeah, I would have. It wouldn’t have lasted, though.”
“Why not?”
“Because she was never you and I’d been in love with you since I was six years old.”
“Logan, that can’t be true.”
“Two things can be true at once. I was in love with you. I was also lonely and wanted something that didn’t seem possible at the time. You were supposed to be the only woman for me butthere was never an opportunity for us to truly be together back then. You’ll never know how sorry I was for not listening to you, for believing her bullshit. I allowed myself to be fooled because I was lonely and it cost me you. The price I paid for giving in and trying to be happy without you was to lose you completely for twelve fucking years. It wasn’t worth it. It was never worth it. Even if she hadn’t stolen from me, everything would have fallen apart because she was trying to be someone she thought I wanted instead of being herself. I didn’t like the woman she was. I liked the woman she pretended to be.” He hesitated for a minute and then gave my arms a little squeeze.
“She modeled herself after you, Aoife. It was like having you there without the barriers between us. That was something I realized later - much later when hindsight allowed me to see everything from the perspective of distance. All the things that drew me to her, beyond our shared love of computers and code, were things she picked up from the times you would visit. I didn’t like her that much before she started to model your behavior and mannerisms.”
“That’s actually really creepy,” I suggested.
“Yeah, I am aware. Miles and I had a lot of conversations about how everything went down. He agreed that she did exactly that. Ultimately, though, it was my own dumbass fault for falling for it, for dropping the ball where you were concerned and letting our friendship slip to the wayside when I was frustrated with our circumstances.”
“With me you mean.”
“Never with you, sweetheart. Our circumstances seemed impossible at times.”
“Yeah,” I huffed out my agreement. “I know. That’s why I worked so hard to graduate early.”
“And I fucked it all up because I thought we had two more years of wading through the lonely spaces between seeing you.”We were both quiet for a moment and then Logan shocked me with his next question. “Do you hate me?”
“No, Lo. I could never hate you. I was heartbroken back then, devastated, and felt immensely betrayed because you had zero faith in me and took that woman’s side without hesitation. I didn’t hate you. In fact, I understood. Aimee, my friend back then, kept trying to get me to give dating other guys a serious go. She thought I needed to move on from the idea of us being together, too, because it wasn’t healthy.
“My situation added a level of desperation to our friendship and our future that tainted everything, even if I didn’t realize it back then. I think if we managed to work things out, and Grace hadn’t insinuated herself in your life back then, you would have ended up resenting me and I would have always wondered if we were together because you loved me or if I was some duty you felt bound to honor. Hindsight did a lot to help me understand our situation, too.”
“I have always loved you, though, Aoife. Even without all the bullshit and your family situation added to our dynamic, I still loved you at the core of everything.”
“I know. I’ve always loved you, too. The thing is, love can be tainted. It can be pulled so tightly that the strings fray and break. We weren’t ready. We both know that. There was too much anxiety, dread, hope, fear, and real danger wrapped up in what we were and what our relationship was supposed to turn into. I don’t blame you for trying to make something easy work back then. I can’t blame you because I don’t think we would have stayed together if we had gotten married back then. It would have been for the wrong reasons, or at the very least the wrong reasons would have been tied to our relationship.”
“I think you’re right.”
“And yet, you still built our house,” I teased to try to lighten the mood.
“I still built our house because I had hope that we’d be able to have the bright and shiny future we used to always dream about - not the parts where we had to worry about your dad or what his mob sidekicks would do to tear us apart. We can have that now, if you’re willing to try. The mafia isn’t a concern anymore. We’ve found one another again.” He picked his hands up and stepped free of me so he could turn in a full 360 degrees as he threw his arms out and indicated the space we occupied. “We have this whole house to fill with memories. New ones. Better ones. What do you say, sweetheart?”
“I say, we should start making them.”
“Maybe we should start with a fresh pot of coffee,” Logan laughed as we both turned our attention to the neglected pot.
I shook my head. “I think we should start with a tour.” I left off the part where I really wanted it to end in the bedroom with us naked and finally able to come together the way I’d always dreamed. I was pretty sure that Logan felt the same way, though. He pulled me back into his embrace and kissed me stupid for a few minutes.
“I can’t tell you the number of times I wanted to do that. Every time I saw you when we were both on break from school, from the time I hit puberty right on up until everything blew up in college, I wanted to be able to kiss your perfect lips.”
“There’s no need to stop on my account,” I teased suggestively.
“Then maybe we should rush the first half of the tour and head straight upstairs. We can do a better job of that later.” He took my hand and led me back out of the kitchen and over to the steps that took us up to the second floor. “Fair warning, I have no clue how the master bedroom was decorated.”
“What do you mean?”
