He smiled. She’d known he would smile, and still it pierced her heart like a harpoon fired from a speargun. He was such a beautiful man. Inside and out. When he smiled, both facets of his beauty shined through.
And he’s mine, she thought with no small amount of wonder. Then she was hit with a terrible notion.Unless he no longer wants me. Unless I blew my chance.
Of course, his next words put her at ease. “Oh, don’t say that. I’mmorethan happy to push past the pain.”
She giggled and shook her head. “Men. Sometimes I think the world could be ending and you wouldn’t notice so long as someone was polishing your knob.”
“But that’s the whole point,” he countered. “Theperfecttime to have my knob polished is when the world is ending. I mean, what a way to go, right?”
They both laughed then. But he sobered first, and his melting-chocolate eyes caught and held hers. “So...” he said tentatively. “You want to explain what this”—he lifted their joined hands—“is about? After you ran out of my hospital room, I thought you might not get within ten feet of me ever again.”
He didn’t try to hide the hurt and confusion in his face when he talked about their last conversation. When she’d run out on him like a...yellow-bellied coward, in the parlance of Granny Susan.
Knowing she’d caused him even amomentof pain had a lump forming in her throat. “It’s hard to stay away from someone who is as much a part of you as the blood in your veins and the air in your lungs,” she admitted quietly. “Plus, I don’twantto stay away.”
The wind ran loving fingers through his hair, tussling it around his face. It was the only thing that moved on him because he’d gone statue still, as if he thought any movement might cause her to turn tail and run.
And why wouldn’t he think that?You’ve given him every reason to believe you’re exactly that kind of flight risk.
“What’s changed?” he asked softly.
“Everything.And I’m so sorry!” she blurted, the lump in her throat making room for her heart to sit beside it. “I’m so sorry for leaving you alone in the hospital. For anything I said to hurt you. I wish I could take it all back.”
She swallowed the tears that burned the back of her nose. “My only excuse is that I was scared. Scared of what I felt for you. Scared of what you felt for me. But mostly I was scared of who I was. Scared that if Itoldyou who I was it’d change the way you felt about me.”
“And you’re...not scared now?” His words came slowly, as if he picked them carefully.
“No.” She shook her head. “Because I’mnotwho I thought I was.” She frowned. “Or maybe it’s more correct to say I’m notwhatI thought I was. You remember when you asked me why I’ve never considered marriage?”
“You told me it was because you didn’t have the first clue how to make a relationship work long-term.”
“That’s only a small part of the truth,” she admitted. “Thebiggerpart is that even though I don’t have the first clue how to make a relationship work long-term, I felt...I stillfeelcertain that one sure way to make itnotwork is to begin it with a lie. Even a lie by omission. And I couldn’t stomach the thought of revealing myself to anyone. Especially not to someone like you. Someone so open and outgoing and virtuous and good and...all the things I’m not. Or...” She shook her head. “All the things IthoughtI wasn’t.”
“Mia.” He turned toward her and grabbed both her hands. His callused fingertips rubbed against her palms, and she shivered slightly at the memory of them rubbing againstotherparts of her. “I’m sorry. I’m really trying to follow along here. But I’m having trouble—”
“I thought I was amurderer,” she exclaimed. “I thought I’d killed my baby brother.”
His chin jerked back. “Didn’t you tell me your brother killedhimself?”
She nodded, trying to arrange her thoughts into some sort of coherent order so that she could lay it all out comprehensibly for him. After a couple of seconds, she gave up on the endeavor and simply said, “I’m going to ramble a bit here.” When she saw him blink, she amended her statement. “Or I’m going to ramblemore. But just stick with me, okay? I swear I’ll do my best to try to make everything clear by the time I get to the end.”
He made a rolling motion with his hand.
She nodded gratefully. And then she told him.Everything.
About always feeling responsible for Andy’s illness, because even though she’d only been seven years old at the time of the overdose, and even though her mother hadsaidthe pills were candy, she’d known they weren’t. She told him how that guilt had led to her developing a strong sense of responsibility toward her brother, which had, in turn, led her to taking on the role of Andy’s guardian—maybe notlegally, but literally and unmistakably. She told him about how anything Andy had ever asked for, she’d gotten for him. About how whatever Andy had ever asked her to do, she’d done.
“I would drop everything for him,” she said. “It didn’t matter what I was doing or where I was, if Andy called, I was there.” She closed her eyes, because she still had trouble admitting this next part. “Except for the night of my twenty-first birthday.”
Romeo was a man of his word. He didn’t coax her to continue when she lapsed into silence. Instead, he simply sat beside her. Strong. Patient.Good.
Everything she’d never dared to dream she could have.
“He called me that evening,” she said quietly, keeping her eyes shut. “Said he wanted me to come over to Mom and Dad’s. Said he had exciting news to share. He sounded a little manic, but not nearly as bad as he had at other times, so I didn’t worry. I told him I couldn’t come over because friends from college were taking me out on the town for some twenty-first birthday fun. I promised him I’d come over the next day and we could talk then.”
She opened her eyes and watched the pod of dolphins frolic, their humped backs curling through the air as they jumped the waves that grew taller as they rolled toward the reef. “But I never saw him again.” Despite her best efforts, the words came out little more than a breath of wind. “He took his life that night.”
Will it ever get easier to say that aloud?
