“So what are you doing here?” Clearly, Jude didn’t feel like pussy-footing around anything this morning. Jumping on his bandwagon, I figured now was as good a time as any to let the rest of my burden, at least the parts I was willing to share with him, off my chest.
“It’s a long fucking story.” Taking another sip of my coffee, I began to feel more and more human. His body heat next to me played a large part of that. It’d been far too long since I’d felt this comfortable with another person this close to me, and I wanted to drink it up just as fast as the coffee I was almost finished with.
Smiling, Jude looked down at his naked wrist. Tapping the watch that wasn’t there, he laughed. “Good thing I got all the time in the world.”
“Well, then there’s no better place to start than the beginning.” I hadn’t intended for my tone to change, to become cold, but it did. It was as natural as breathing to think about that day with so much hate and bitterness.
Fully aware of what I was talking about, recognition dawned on Jude’s face, softening it with shame. “Micah,” he choked on my name. “Look, about that—”
“Stop.” I cut him off abruptly but without anger or meanness. “Don’t say you’re sorry.”
“But what if I am?”
I knew he was. He had to be. It was what he said and did that day that separated us for the last decade. His words and actions set me on a path that would forever alter who I was. Of course neither of us knew it at the time, but without that day, I never would have met Delilah, who never would have gotten pregnant, and we never would have gotten married, and I never would have enlisted in the army in order to escape the life I was living.
But I couldn’t get into all that with him right now. I wasn’t prepared to deal with him knowing about her, about Simon, just yet. All I needed to do was get to the bottom of us right now. And that all started with that one fateful day, ten years ago.
“Then you can say it later,” I finally answered. The truth was, I wasn’t ready to forgive him just yet. “Do you remember what happened?” Even though it was a stupid fucking question—the day seared into my permanence—I had to hear if it was the same for him.
“Every fucking day,” he cursed, raking his hands through his hair. As he stared up at the ceiling as if it held the answers to every question he would ever ask, he said, “It plays over and over in my head. At the most inconvenient times. Every day, I think about what happened, and there isn’t a single one of those days I don’t regret every single fucking word I said, every single thing I did.”
The pain in his words said all the apologies he would ever need to.
“Then why did you do it? Why push me away?” I hated the weakness in my own words, but there was no façade thick enough to cover up my pain.
“I didn’t want to,” he admitted, his voice so quiet I thought maybe I’d said the words in my head. But then he continued, cementing them in my existence forever. “I wanted you. I wanted you so fucking bad I didn’t know what to do with myself. Every fucking night, I would lie in my bed, playing out scene after scene the time I would finally go for it. Say fuck it and let you know how I felt about you. But then the next day would come around and I would pussy out.”
Even though I had assumed he felt that way, shock washed over me, rendering me speechless. “But . . . ,” I choked out, unable to say anything intelligible.
“I know it doesn’t make any sense. And it’s something that’s weighed on me every day since then.”
Wavering between anger so red hot it would engulf the room in its flames, and sorrow so blue it would drown us, pull us under its powerful waves, I didn’t know which emotion to settle on. “That’s why I left,” I admitted quietly. “It’s why I enlisted.” Leaving out all the other details, he needed to know at least that effect of his actions. My brain rushed with a million thoughts, wondering how different everything could have been.
“I figured as much,” he said, sadness filling his words. Though it seemed as if he was trying to avoid it, his gaze fell to my arm. “You blame me.” Filled with a certainty like the sky being blue, he wasn’t asking a question. He was making a statement, clear as day.
But he was wrong. “No.” Mustering as much conviction as I could, I needed him to believe me. Because I didn’t blame anyone when it came to what happened to my arm.
Except myself.
“Listen,” I continued. “This,” I eyed my arm, “isn’t your fault, at all.” He didn’t believe me. I could see it in his eyes. “That day, when I came to your house . . .” Not really sure where I was going or how I was going to say what I needed to say, or ask what I needed to ask, I let my words trail off.
“It was the best day of my life. Even to this day, it was.” His words rocked me to my core. It wasn’t that I hadn’t wanted to hear them. I just never expected them to be laced with so much emotion, so much remorse for what once was. Somehow, knowing he regretted it that much, even ten years later, made the memory that much easier to deal with.
