That. I can’t deal with that. Not when she knows the truth about me and my family. It was so much easier to deal with when the problem was just some boneheaded move on my part, not an unchangeable part of myself.
Like my entire life hasn’t been needing to push my worst self away, resist all my impulses, and she has the audacity to be understanding of them. How dare she love me in the way I need to be loved when I am trying my fucking hardest to stay away from her.
I want her to know that someone would choose her first, would choose her over everything.
Even if it can’t be me.
I sigh and scrub a hand over my face. “No, dammit. I would do it again in a heartbeat. All of it.”
The words spill out, a confession I have been biting my teeth closed on, maybe even since she first arrived.
I don’t know if that’s what she is looking for, but she blinks in surprise, her posture easing.
“I . . . what?”
“As many times as you gave me, I’d be back again for you. Even if it ended in another divorce.”
Her mouth falls open, but she says nothing. My whole being aches to capture that mouth in a desperate kiss.
“I wouldn’t change a thing. I’d go through all the heartbreak of you leaving again, if it meant spending any amount of time together again. And I don’t care if that makes me a sap or pathetic, I am all of that for you,” I say, and it’s oddly freeing to just tell her. “Losing you is worth having had you at all.”
But she needs to hear it, and maybe I’ve owed her this the entire time. Maybe I was just so scared of all the worst outcomes that I kept this final sliver of vulnerability to myself.
But the worst came to pass, and I didn’t protect myself. I just hurt her.
“You have been worth every minute of it, unfair or not, terrible ending and all. I’d do it again. No changes, no notes. I loved you then, I love you now. Stay. Keep your life here. And if we can’t make it work, tell me to leave and I will.”
Elise’s eyes are glassy. She looks like she wants to say something, like she’s on the edge of finding the words she wants, and I lean in to hear them.
Of course, it’s the moment Logan chooses to appear, thudding down the stairs.
I love my family, I really do.
Logan looks like he’s ready to bite someone’s head off, possibly in a very literal way, as he interrupts our little moment. Asshole isn’t even fully dressed for the wedding, and it’s in what, thirty minutes?
“Is there a reason you two are blocking traffic?” he asks, like the kitchen is currently a high-traffic area.
Elise shuffles out of the way, and he still rolls his eyes like it wasn’t fast enough. Her brow furrows as she looks at him, the way he looks a little paler than usual, sweat beading at his scalp. “Dude, are you ok?”
“No, I’m not. I need an ice pack. Where is all the fucking ice in this kitchen? Didn’t I just see like twelve bags of ice a minute ago?” He bitches in a way that, to me, is incredibly reminiscent of when he was a hot-headed teen, slamming the lid of one empty cooler after another.
“Logan, jeez, calm down,” Elise says, raising her hands in a placating gesture.
She moves to assist, but Logan is already two steps ahead of her, crossing from the empty cooler to the freezer.
“Don’t tell me to calm down! When in the history of telling people to calm down has it actually done anything?” he snaps back at her, taking things out haphazardly and discarding most of it aside.
“Hey! Don’t talk to her like that,” I say, warning in my voice, my claws pressing out of my fingertips territorially.
Logan barely glances in my direction as he digs through the freezer for probably a bag of frozen peas or something.
“It’s fine, he’s just stressed.”
“I don’t care, groomzilla over there needs to tone it down.”
Logan barks out a hollow, joyless laugh, and exits the kitchen. I hear something like marbles hitting the floor, and more swearing follows him.
Did he just immediately puncture the bag of peas?
