“For a minute there …” Oliver said with a laugh.
Short as it lasted, I loved seeing that laughter. Finally, the laughter lines on his face were as visible as the fault lines that were forming on his forehead.
“Now my son is old enough to want me to meet his serious girlfriend.” I chuckled again, though my throat stung, thinking about how the financial pit I had dug for myself was about to fuck up my sons’ lives.
We strolled in silence for a few more yards.
“We should head back,” he said. The sky was that purple and dark-orange blend now.
A loaded silence followed the lighter mood I had managed to achieve between us. Maybe because we had both answered each other’s questions, but these only served as an opening for more questions that neither one of us dared to utter.
When we left the beach behind and walked through the gate into the garden with the empty pool at the heart of it, we stopped. This was where we would split.
We faced each other in the breeze that rustled the bushes lining the fence. Even here, the constant lull of the ocean waves and the scattered screams of a few tardy seagulls were heard.
“I’m leaving early tomorrow morning,” Oliver said.
“It’s your house, and I feel like you’re leaving because I’m here.”
“No. I have business to attend to that would take a while. Listen, January, I know you feel like I’m doing you a favor with the house, but I’m not. I would offer you a—”
“Don’t you dare,” I cut him off.
“A loan, okay? Not a present. A loan. But I knew you’d react like that, even though—”
“Oliver, stop.”
“I’m not doing you a favor, January. What you did …” He looked away, then back at me. “You didn’t quit on me that night, so I didn’t quit on myself. And you gave me the push I needed to walk away.”
My heart throbbed. I swallowed the salty, moist air. I wasn’t sure if he meant walking away from his father or from me, as well.
“You owe me nothing, Oliver. You stood up for me with no questions asked. In junior high and now.”
The breeze swept back his golden-brown hair. “So, we’ll call it even?” He smiled.
I tried to smile back, but I couldn’t because, right now, more than anything and despite everything, I wanted to kiss him,neededto feel him—the hardened man he was now, the wounded teen and twenty-something he was then.
I took a step forward.
Oliver and I were still. Still as we had been once in a motel room. What Vi said was true. Everything in me begged for him, although his gaze became distant, harder, at my approach.
I rose to my toes and pressed my lips against his. That unyielding restraint was there; he didn’t kiss me back.
I began to pull away, but just then, Oliver circled his arm around my waist, pulled me into him, and crashed his lips on mine. I could taste him—the salt the breeze had dusted his lips with, the sweet warmth of his mouth—because all at once it became a deep, devouring kiss. Oliver wrapped me completely in his arms, one hand nestling the back of my head, his fingers lacing my hair, holding me firmly against him, the other splaying across and stroking the side of my face. He kissed me as if our kiss had been percolating on the back burner all this time and I had suddenly poured gasoline over it.
I never knew until that moment that past kisses could be branded into you, that lips had memories. Kissing Oliver now, feeling his body against mine felt exactly how it had on the carpet in his bedroom all those years ago. It did to my body what it had back then, too. I was wet fire, molten lava.
I kissed him as I had back then, as if this touch could heal and piece us up, our individual hearts, our shared beat.
As if he felt it, too, Oliver tightened his hold and deepened our kiss even further.
But, all of a sudden, as if indeed he had touched hot lava and got burned, he detached himself from me as abruptly as he had caught me and stepped back. So abruptly that, when I opened my eyes, I noticed that his arms remained open and empty. Where my body had filled his embrace a second ago, there was only air between his arms now.
I met his gaze. His eyes were clouded, as if a mist had settled over a green forest. A muscle tensed in his neck and jaw. He dropped his arms to his side.
“January, I’m not cut out for this, for you. You think you know me, but you don’t. Not anymore. I don’t want this. Trust me,youdon’t want this.” His tone was gruff and becoming rougher with every uttered word.
I kept my eyes on him.
